Peter Wahlstrom

Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS)’s surprise loss during what’s usually its most profitable quarter was triggered by a 26 percent sales drop at Nook, the only segment that had been growing and is essential to aiding a shift to e-books.

The net loss of $6.06 million, which included $74 million in charges from plummeting demand for its newest Nook tablets, comes three days after founder and Chairman Leonard Riggio said he planned to offer to buy the bookstore chain’s retail assets. These results may speed up a sale …

For Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) founder Leonard Riggio to take his bookstores private, he may need to write a check for more than the entire company’s market value.

Riggio said yesterday that he will offer to buy the retail stores and website of the New York-based company he started more than 40 years ago, leaving shareholders with Barnes & Noble’s college book and Nook e-reader businesses. The retail chain alone is worth about $1 billion, according to the average of four analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg…

Maybe you’ve noticed that there seem to be a lot of Barnes & Noble superstores closing lately? Not just stores in remote locations (like, say, this one in upstate New York), but in some of the nation’s largest metropolitan shopping areas, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Seattle, Chicago, two stores in Dallas, another in Austin, and Manhattan. And that’s just in the last 30 days or so.

What had been a slow shrinkage as leases ran out turned into an avalanche after Thanksgiving.

Add another happy beneficiary of the publishing powerhouse “Fifty Shades of Grey”: Barnes & Noble.

Sales of the erotic trilogy, which has dominated paperback and e-book best-seller lists for most of the year, along with the liquidation of the Borders chain in 2011, helped lift comparable bookstore sales in the fiscal first quarter at Barnes & Noble by 4.6 percent, the company said on Tuesday.

More Blogs