Parneros’ complaint portrays B&N as a company in turmoil; the B&N board labeled the the charges, “nothing but an attempt to extort money.
Catching up with PW's Andrew Albanese
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CCC’s Beyond the Book had planned to skip our weekly Friday conversation with Andrew Albanese of Publishers Weekly, ahead of the Labor Day holiday weekend in the US. But there’s always a caveat with vacations for journalists– if breaking news is hot enough, we step right up to the microphones. And on Tuesday, the news was five-alarm hot!
In a lawsuit alleging breach of contract and defamation of character, Demos Parneros, the recently fired former CEO of Barnes & Noble, made a series of startling statements about the bookseller and its management. B&N fired back with equally strong words.
“In the opening paragraph, the Parneros complaint portrays B&N founder Len Riggio as ‘a volatile founder who refuses to relinquish control.’ Parneros’ complaint goes on to portray B&N as a company in turmoil for several years, with falling revenue, declining profits, store closings, significant turnover of staff and management, layoffs, and an e-book business that flopped,” Albanese reports.
For its part, the B&N board labeled the Parneros charges, “nothing but an attempt to extort money from the Company by a CEO who was terminated for sexual harassment, bullying behavior and other violations of company policies after being in the role for approximately one year.”
According to published reports, Parneros revealed in the papers filed for his lawsuit that B&N was recently up for sale, and that a buyer had been found, only to see the deal suddenly withdrawn.
“Let’s not kid ourselves here—the book business cares little about the actual outcome of this suit, right? What’s in the filing is what is of interest here, and however the suit is resolved, the revelations in this complaint alone, before any depositions have even been taken, suggests there may be a bigger mess at Barnes & Noble than any of us could have anticipated,” Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.
Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.
