As many hope for stable leadership at the biggest bookselling chain in the US, former CEO Demos Parneros has launched a suit revealing more questions about the beleaguered company
On August 28, news broke that former B&N CEO Demos Parneros had filed a lawsuit seeking $4 million in damages for severance and defamation in his abrupt dismissal on July 3. It’s a perplexing, worrisome turn of events that appears to expose power struggles in the company’s executive suite—plus a lost potential sale that, presumably, could have infused the chain with much-needed capital.
The court filing alleges that Parneros had been “consistently praised by [chairman Len] Riggio, the board, investors, and publishers,” but that Riggio “engineered Parneros’s firing without cause and issued an announcement that falsely and irrevocably damaged the reputation Parneros had worked for 35 years to build.” Parneros clearly wants to peg Barnes & Noble founder and executive chairman Riggio as the real problem—someone who is volatile and “who refuses to relinquish control and thus impedes B&N management’s ability to effect meaningful change.” The filing also portrays Riggio as insulting and insensitive to staff.
Parneros reveals that a deal to sell the bookstore chain fell through in early June, and he alleges that this event prompted Riggio to “turn against Parneros and fabricate reasons to fire” him. Those reasons, as Chris Dolmetsch writes at Bloomberg, are said by Parneros to have included a false complaint that he violated the company’s sexual harassment policy with an executive assistant. Parneros also claims that he was wrongly accused of mistreating a fellow executive.
The Barnes & Noble board issued a strong statement blasting the lawsuit as “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.”
Parneros was the struggling company’s fifth CEO since 2010, and as Alex Shephard observed at The New Republic, “Much of Parneros’s lawsuit is aimed at Riggio’s leadership. … There has been growing frustration with Riggio in the publishing industry, as Barnes & Noble has failed to settle on a strategy after it all but abandoned its ebook business.” Shephard goes on to speculate, not illogically, that Canada’s chief bookseller, Indigo, might have been the interested buyer of the chain, although the Canadian company has declined to confirm this.
Bottom line: At the moment, in an industry that’s reliant on the last-standing major US bookselling chain of some 630 stores, everyone is perplexed. At Publishers Weekly, Jim Milliot quotes industry players who point out that, under Parneros, it had appeared the company might be making progress—and that, moving forward, the publishing business needs to see at B&N “a CEO who is actually running the company.” But for the moment, as Michael Cader observed at Publishers Lunch in his (paywalled) coverage, “No matter what happens with the lawsuit, it will likely make the search for a new CEO even harder.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
