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Barnes & Noble won't buy Ingram

Barnes & Noble scuttles a $600 million plan to buy privately held independent distributor Ingram Book Group rather than face further scrutiny of federal regulators.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Barnes & Noble today scuttled a $600 million plan to buy privately held independent distributor Ingram Book Group rather than face further scrutiny of federal regulators.

Barnes & Noble, in a statement, said it will "continue to work closely with Ingram," while investing the $600 million it would have spent on buying the firm on other acquisitions and investments. The company also plans to build two new distribution centers in Reno, Nevada, and Memphis, Tennessee.

Cancellation of the deal follows reports this week that the Federal Trade Commission staff believed the merger would give Barnes & Noble an unfair competitive edge.

Both Ingram and Barnes & Noble, in a statement this morning, said they agreed to kill the deal over worries that a lengthy FTC review would hurt their businesses.

"Although both companies believe that the transaction would ultimately be approved in the courts, protracted litigation would not be in the best interests of Barnes & Noble or Ingram," the statement said.

Merger plans, first announced in November, drew criticism from smaller independent booksellers, who use Ingram as a sole supplier of their books, as well as online book selling giant Amazon.com., to which Ingram is a large supplier.