Dohle and Riggio talk all things B&N

The Association of American Publishers' annual meeting, held at Penguin Random House earlier this week (8th March) was themed “Charting the Future,” its centerpiece a Q&A interview by PRH c.e.o. Markus Dohle of Barnes & Noble c.e.o. Len Riggio.

Their conversation spent as much time looking back as looking forward: Riggio clearly wanted to remind his audience of where B&N had come from and all it had done, before responding to the well-known challenges it faces. The overriding message we knew:  “We need B&N,” Dohle said. “I’ll buy that,” Riggio responded.

Riggio started as a clerk at the New York University bookstore 59 years ago. His was the vision and passion that made B&N, and he’s still its largest shareholder. He stepped down in 2002 to devote time to art and philanthropy – who knew that, as Dohle revealed, Riggio developed private homes for needy families in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? He returned to take the reins last year, after the latest in a line of misguided c.e.o.s was fired.

When he started out, serving students instilled “a sense of mission”: if they needed a certain textbook and couldn’t get it, they might fail. Books could be “life-changing.” The seed for the “vast selection” of the superstore was sown. He began when the mass market revolution was at full steam, and spoke partly as an autodidact: “I damn near read everything, Herodotus for 75c, Shakespeare for 45c. My whole life is a result.”

In 1971, he bought B&N, which was failing. It was to be democratizing, a store to serve “aspirants” like him, “not just the already arrived.” As the business grew, he wanted to make people “hit the door and say ‘wow'” – thus the first superstores. He put them all over Middle America, in places that never had a bookstore, where they became central to the community.   

After noting that Riggio had developed “the original everything store,” Dohle asked if he now was considering “fewer titles and lower quantities,” or a model more akin to Indigo’s in Canada. “The ‘everything store’ for books is where we live. We’re always going to lead with books,” Riggio insisted. Indigo’s “cultural department store” is “doing a great job, but we don’t have it in our DNA. Less than 20% of our sales are non-book. They could grow to 25% - I wish – but centered on books is who we are and want to be.”

When Dohle raised the spectre of that “other everything store that started in books and now is everything for everybody,” asking if the competition’s move from that exclusive focus “presented an opportunity,” Riggio shot back: “I don’t like to play that hand. You have the world’s first supercompany. You have to admire the sheer will, competitiveness. They are who they are; we are who we are.”

Dohle pointed to the courage it had taken to plough so much into Nook, to build 25% market share but then see it erode. Riggio turned again to history, to his having gone to Bill Gates with a design for a multimedia device 10 years before the first e-reader, and B&N’s later partnering on the Rocket e-book.

“After Kindle, we seemingly started late, created Nook, but in the end, our people just couldn’t do it. I’m not a technologist. It got out of control.” B&N is sticking with the much-attenuated Nook, manufactured by someone else. “No way will we get out of that.”

Dohle asked how B&N.com plans to better compete on print. Riggio emphasized that “part of the business is hidden: we do a huge amount of orders online that are picked up in stores. We have a lot of brand loyalty. We’re not going to be online leader, but we’re still scrappy, we’ve got a good group of young people now, with heads on straight, on the right path.”

With six million members – paying $25 each – Riggio agreed with Dohle that B&N’s loyalty programme is “the glue between channels. Our underlying technology and database are now up to snuff. The back end is secure, so we can work on the front.” A major review is underway.

Dohle’s final question concerned how publishers might help. Riggio wasn’t shy: “We don’t get many heads of houses visiting our home office. We need more connections. You should go see some of the stores outside major cities, talk to our managers, look at our customers.

“I’d like to see publishers figure out how to re-engage with the whole idea of mass market, with aspirants. Consider another iteration of the mass market book.”

Len Riggio is a very dapper man, in his late seventies. The question that wasn’t asked has to do with who’ll come next. It needs to be someone just as book-passionate.  Meanwhile, as Dohle concluded, “Len, we are all rooting for you.”