NEW YORK, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble said it is open for offers to buy the company due to falling stock prices.
The retailer with 720 outlets said it is open to "strategic alternatives, including a possible sale," The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Similar to newspapers and magazines, booksellers are finding it difficult to compete with the growing reliance on digital sources for reading material. Just as advertisers have fled to the Internet, leaving traditional print news formats high and dry, digital readers, like Kindle and the iPad, along with a general movement away from paper products, including maps and gift cards, is giving fits to the owners of book stores that depend on large retail spaces.
Market analyst Mike Shatzkin, chief executive officer of Idea Logical Co., said, "Anybody with their eyes open knows that the retail book market is increasingly challenged."
Barnes & Noble, valued at about $2.2 billion in 2001, sells about 300 million books a year, the Journal said.
