Steve Riggio has stepped down from the CEO position of Barnes & Noble to become B&N’s Vice Chairman. The new CEO will be William Lynch. In addition to serving as President of the Barnes & Noble website, bn.com, Lynch has an impressive amount of e-commerce experience with HSN.com and Gifts.com (which he co-founded), as well as a lot of involvement with e-commerce and websites for Palm.
As Gizmodo’s headline puts it, “Barnes & Noble has no illusions about what it’s becoming.” It seems like a pretty clear indication of what B&N sees in its future to appoint an e-commerce and Palm veteran as CEO over its entire operation.
I’m excited in many of the steps B&N has taken lately. As the discussion of Amazon vs. Publishers indicates, the industry needs more than one distributor and, like it or not, B&N is our best hope for a successful Amazon competitor. Picking an electronic retail veteran as CEO sounds like a great step.
Rob Preece
Publisher