The story
In February 2015, Barnes & Noble had announced plans to spin off its college bookstore assets and create a separate company called Barnes & Noble Education. On August 3, 2015, Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol, "BNED". The company operates stores dedicated to selling college textbooks, both on and off campus.
In June 2016, Barnes & Noble Education completed the acquisition of Promoversity, a custom merchandise supplier and e-commerce business that works with the collegiate bookstore business and its customers.
In February 2017, Barnes & Noble Education had acquired MBS Textbook Exchange, a major textbook distributor based in Columbia, Missouri, for $174.2 million in cash.
By December 2018, Barnes & Noble Education had operated or managed 773 campus bookstores under contracts. Two years later, Barnes & Noble Education operated 760 campus bookstores and school-branded e-commerce sites through its Barnes & Noble College Booksellers division at the end of 2020.
In July 2019, BNED revealed that the company had turned down several offers by California-based Bay Capital Finance to take over the company citing that the offers by Bay Capital were "substantially undervalued BNED, were highly conditional and not credible." Unlike its former parent company, BNED was diversifying its business by the acquisition of many digital services companies to increase the number of services offered by its Digital Student Solutions division during its past four years as an independent company.
In January 2020, a class-action antitrust lawsuit was filed against BNED, along with rival Follett as well as college textbook companies Cengage, McGraw-Hill Education, and Pearson, alleging that so-called "inclusive access" programs, which involve automatically billing students for course materials, constituted a conspiracy of which the "end goal and result is eliminating competitors and raising prices." In June 2021, the case was dismissed by District Judge Denise Cote.
Digital Student Solutions division
In March 2016, Barnes & Noble Education enlarged their Digital Student Solutions online services division by acquiring LoudCloud Systems, a digital platform and analytics provider to clients in higher education, the for-profit sector, and K-12 segment.
In August 2017, Barnes & Noble Education acquired Student Brands for $58.5 million.
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In August 2018, Barnes & Noble Education acquired PaperRater, a service that helps students write papers and identify plagiarism.
From Wikipedia’s article on BNED, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7