[AnemicOak]

Riggio Reiterates B&N's Commitment to Restoring Growth

As one of the featured speakers at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting held March 8 in New York, Barnes & Noble CEO Len Riggio delivered something of a bookselling history lesson, as well as his vision for the future of the country's biggest bricks and mortar book retailer.

Riggio repeated that turning around negative comparable store sales into positive comps at the company is key to its future. Riggio said he thought B&N was on its way to achieving positive comps, but the distraction caused by the presidential election and its aftermath ended the upward momentum.

Riggio acknowledged that B&N’s expansion into manufacturing digital devices was a mistake, saying, "we’re not a technology company.” And the Nook unit, which at one point had as many as 1,600 employees, he said is now, after dramatic cuts, at about the right size, selling devices manufactured by third parties, but that carry the Nook name. Riggio said that while Nook is significantly smaller, he still wants B&N to be able to sell customers an e-book if that is what they want. On the topic of online sales versus in-store sales, Riggio noted that B&N does "a huge amount of business” from customers who order books online and then pick them up in a store.