To make his big stores cozier, he installed sofas and coffee bars. Riggio believed that independent bookstores were too small to be efficient and customers had to wait weeks for special orders, so he went big in order to stock thousands more books. In the Barnes & Noble story, the protagonist is modern-day founder Len Riggio, whom Wired magazine described in a 1999 article as “tempestuous, 5’7, wears an anachronism of a mustache, and spits out quick jagged sentences” in a New York outer-borough accent. The success of Barnes & Noble even served as the backdrop for the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, where a superstore chain offering book discounts kills the business of a beloved local bookshop. The ups and downs of bookstore chain Barnes & Noble paint a tale as gripping as the plot of a bestselling potboiler: A Horatio Alger-type entrepreneur whose dad was a boxer and part-time taxicab driver drops out of college to build the biggest bookstore chain in the country.
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