Meanwhile, in November Bertelsmann separately launched its own BooksOnline service in several European countries. The service used its new collaboration with barnesandnoble.com to offer customers worldwide the experience of shopping on-line for books in multiple languages.

In another major deal, Barnes & Noble acquired distribution giant Ingram Book Group for $200 million in cash and $400 million in stock, much to the consternation of many in the publishing and bookselling world. The purchase put Barnes & Noble in control of the primary distributor for its main on-line competitor, Amazon.com, and for most of the small chains and independent bookstores throughout the United States. The American Booksellers Association issued an official statement in which it considered the purchase to be “a devastating development that threatens the viability of competition in the book industry, and limits the diversity and availability of books to consumers.”

In a separate case, the ABA and a number of independent booksellers filed an anti-trust lawsuit in March in the US District Court for Northern California, accusing Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstore chains of violating anti-trust laws by using their estimated combined annual buying power of $5 billion to receive secret preferential treatment from publishers. B&N chairman Len Riggio hit back with an open letter to the media denying the ABA’s assertion that book superstores were responsible for the decline in independents and stated that there was no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Barnes & Noble.

America’s Crown Books filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July after the new owner failed to find a buyer. This resulted in the closure of 79 of the chain’s 174 stores. Having already returned many books to publishers earlier in the year, Crown was subsequently sued by its principal supplier, Ingram, who claimed payment for $10 million in books. Ingram eventually agreed to accept more returns and extend new credit to the chain in exchange for “super-priority” status as an unsecured creditor.