Liberty Media reduces stake in bookstore chain Barnes & Noble

Liberty Media Corp, run by billionaire John Malone, once regarded as the king of cable, yesterday said that it was reducing its stake in Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the US, without disclosing the financial terms of the deal.

Liberty Media, the Englewood, Colorado-based entertainment and e-commerce conglomerate, said it would reduce its holding to around 1.66 per cent from 16.6 per cent,buit dis not disclose the identity of the buyers, except that the majority of the buyers were institutional investors.

Liberty Media's CEO Gregory Maffei will step down from the board of Barnes & Noble but senior vice president, Mark Carleton, will stay on.

"By reducing our preferred position and eliminating some of our related rights, Barnes & Noble will gain greater flexibility to accomplish their strategic objectives," Maffei said in a statement.

In 2011, Liberty Media acquired a minority stake in Barnes & Noble, three months after it proposed buying the company for $1.02-billion. (See: Liberty Media abandons takeover, buys 16.6 % of Barnes & Noble)

Liberty Media acquired 16.6 per cent of Barnes & Noble in 2011 for $17 each for a total investment of $204 million.

According to some media reports, the deal to buy the whole of Barnes & Noble fell apart because the two companies could not agree on a valuation for Nook e-reader amid the then volatile stock market.

Nook is the second largest after Amazon's Kindle digital-book reader, which Barnes & Noble has been developing to counter the erosion of paper-book sales.