Promising New Chapter for Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble combines a low stock-market valuation with a solid fundamental story that is still underappreciated.

Shares of the country's dominant bricks-and-mortar bookseller have risen 39%, to $23, since Barron's published a bullish feature last spring ("Why Barnes & Noble Could Double," May 26). But they could hit the $30s in 2015 if the company separates Nook, its digital unit, from the rest of its business by August, as expected. Barron's sum-of-the-parts valuation for B&N (ticker: BKS) was $36 in our article; if anything, that was conservative, as it assigned no value to Nook.