The Digital Revolution has claimed many brick and mortar victims but none so formidable as Barnes & Noble.  The world’s largest bookstore has put itself up for sale.

To understand why you only have to weigh B&N’s capitalization of $950 million against the capital value of Amazon.com: $55 billion, according to Wall Street Journal‘s Jeffrey Trachtenberg and Dennis K. Berman.

“The sales process won’t mean much for consumers right away,” the WSJ journalists write, “but a new owner may have a different strategy, potentially trimming the number of outlets as profits slide. Over the past three years, Barnes & Noble’s annual profits have slid from $135.8 million to $75.9 million to $36.7 million.”

Though authors and consumers may feel warmly towards the book chain, whose stores often serve as community centers, not everyone will shed a tear.  Barnes & Noble’s superstore-building rampage in the 1990s drove innumerable local independent bookshops out of business.  Its predatory business practices, such as extracting big fees from publishers for stocking books in favorable positions in the front of the store, drove cash-poor small publishers into the arms of a handful of major houses.

So, if there are fewer independent bookstores, fewer independent publishers, and fewer midlist authors in 21st century publishing, we can look to Barnes & Noble as a major contributor. The Riggio brothers will walk away wealthy beyond our dreams of avarice, but they will step over many ruins on the way to the bank.

Read details in Barnes & Noble on Block

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal .