Leonard Riggio transformed the publishing industry by building Barnes & Noble into the country’s most powerful bookseller before his company was overtaken by the rise of Amazon.
Leonard Riggio, then chairman of Barnes & Noble, arrives at a bookstore in New York on Sept. 12, 2017. Riggio died on Tuesday.
“Our bookstores were designed to be welcoming as opposed to intimidating,” Riggio told The New York Times in 2016. “These weren’t elitist places. You could go in, get a cup of coffee, sit down and read a book for as long as you like, use the restroom. These were innovations that we had that no one thought was possible.”
When novelist Russell Banks, addressing Barnes & Noble’s annual shareholder meeting in 1995, declared that he was both a stock holder and a happy B&N customer, some independent sellers stopped offering his books. “We’re great booksellers; we know how to do that,’’ Riggio acknowledged to the Times in 2016. “We weren’t constituted to be a technology company.”
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