Mr. Riggio, 71 years old, built Barnes & Noble into a retail powerhouse in the 1980s and ’90s, and he still controls about 30% of the company’s common stock.

His expression of interest so far has been tentative, although one of the people said he was expected to make it formal this week, including with a public disclosure of his interest. If it proceeded, Barnes & Noble’s 689 retail stores would be taken private, separated from the company’s college-store chain and its Nook e-reader and tablet business.

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The Seattle-based company has lost four of its top executives, representing 40 years of combined service. So far, only one has been replaced.

All of the changes have happened quietly, without any announcements from the company — and stranger yet, most of the departed continue to be listed on the company’s leadership page.

But the departures are easily trackable after reading the company’s annual report filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission. When compared with the same filing a year earlier, it’s clear that Amazon’s top ranks are dwindling.

In 2011, the executive team had a dozen members. Now it has nine. The departures appear, though, to be part of a normal turnover process, rather than any meaningful restructuring.

Still, it’s hard to comprehend that Amazon’s management team has gotten smaller during the past year while the company’s overall headcount swelled to 88,400 in 2012 from 56,200 in 2011. Additionally, the e-commerce giant has entered several new businesses over the past decade.

The four executives who are gone are: Michelle Wilson, Amazon’s general counsel; Steven Kessel, SVP of Worldwide Digital Media; Marc Onetto, SVP of Worldwide Operations; and Sebastian J. Gunningham, SVP of Seller Services.

Two of the departures are easier to explain than the others.

For example, Wilson, who had been the company’s general counsel since 1999, stepped down in September to take parental leave. Her departure was documented by GeekWire in August, and Ty Rogers, a company spokesman, confirmed that she was replaced by David Zapolsky, who now holds three titles: VP, general counsel and secretary.

Another executive who can easily be accounted for is Kessel, who oversaw the company’s digital strategy, including books, music, video and the all-important Kindle. He has been on sabbatical now for about a year, as we reported last April.

“Steve continues to enjoy his well-deserved sabbatical, and we look forward to him returning later this year,” Rogers said.

Rogers also explained the departure of Onetto, though very briefly, saying that he had decided to retire after seven years on the job. Rogers declined to specify Onetto’s departure date, but according to the company’s annual report, he is no longer a top executive.

The biggest mystery of the four is the disappearance of Gunningham from the executive officer list (mostly because Rogers would offer only vague comments related to his standing at the company). Gunningham had served as the company’s SVP of Seller Services for five years. Update: Gunningham continues to hold the same title at Amazon, but is no longer a Section 16 officer, according to the company.

As I previously reported, I called what I believe to be Gunningham’s home number twice to clarify, but no one answered and his voicemail was full (Note to Gunningham: clean out your inbox!).

And, in response to multiple inquiries, Rogers repeated one answer: “As you may know, the 10-K only lists Section 16 officers.”

To explain, a Section 16 officer is essentially legal jargon for a member of the company’s executive team, so essentially Rogers is saying that Gunningham is simply that — no longer on the executive team.

Amazon, like other publicly held companies, is not required to disclose the departure of all executive team members, only the CEO, president, CFO, chief accounting officer and COO (although there are some exceptions). Therefore, the one way to notice if an executive has left is by checking the annual report year after year. In this case, that’s especially true since Amazon generally has no C-level execs. Rather, all of its officers hold the title of SVP.

Despite the departures, the Amazon team still has a bench of nine executives (including Wilson’s replacement), so it’s not like the company is running without an engine. And, of course, at the top of the pyramid continues to be founder and Chairman and CEO, Jeff Bezos.

That’s according to a new report from the Pew Research Center, which surveyed over 2,000 Americans age 16 and up during a month-long period just before the holidays.

The number of consumers who read e-books is up seven percent to nearly a quarter of those surveyed, compared with data from the same time period a year ago. This coincided with a decline in those who say they still read dead-tree books, from 72 percent to 67 percent over a 12-month period.

The Pew report focuses on how this impacts libraries and e-book lending. But what’s more interesting is the data surrounding the types of devices consumers are e-reading on.

A quarter of those surveyed own tablets, like the iPad or Kindle Fire, compared with 10 percent of consumers who said the same a year ago. Meanwhile, just 19 percent said they owned a Kindle or Nook, compared with 10 percent last year.

So, tablet ownership shows a slightly greater increase than e-reader ownership — more evidence that e-readers are slowly losing momentum as tablets gain share. As reported recently by the New York Times Bits blog, IHS iSuppli estimates shipments of e-book readers will suffer a 36 percent drop this year, falling to 14.9 million units.

And a report from eMarketer suggests “2011 might prove to have been the high-water mark for ereaders. IHS iSuppli predicted continued declines, with worldwide shipments falling to just 7.1 million units by 2016.”

Customer buys book because of fake review = zero harm

–Mystery novelist J. A. Konrath, writing on his blog about Amazon’s fake-reviewer crackdown

As with previous rounds of predictions he has made — like for 2011 and 2012 — some of what he predicts already kind of makes sense if you’ve been paying attention to the way things are going, but will become more pronounced in the coming year. Others are a little more surprising.

1. “Carryalongs” Dominate Global Computer Markets
Anderson lumps notebooks, tablets and everything in between into a category he has labeled “carryalongs,” and he says they will take their place as the largest segment of computing devices. “Surface and slates and iPads and Kindle Fire and Nexus 10 and everything else that’s got a 7-inch screen plus or minus an inch or so, will be the biggest category of computing device.” Okay, then.

2. Intel: Long Live the King, the King Is Dead
Intel may still be the biggest supplier of chips to the world’s computing devices, but if you look at prediction number one, you know that Intel doesn’t yet play a significant role in the “carryalong” market outside of traditional notebooks. “Qualcomm and ARM are the new William and Kate,” Anderson says. Intel is primarily a supplier to the world’s server vendors. With CEO Paul Otellini retiring in May, the one way out of its current troubles will be to name a new CEO with what Anderson says are “real tech chops.” Otellini, he says, “marked the first time a marketing guy got the CEO job at Intel. Before that they were all engineers, except Craig Barrett who was an operating guy.” Intel, he says, “has lost the consumer stuff, the handheld stuff, the slate and tablet stuff. All it has left are servers. It has lost the mastery that it had.”

3. Net TV Dominates
A majority of U.S.-based homes will have Internet-connected TVs and related products like AppleTV, Roku boxes and so on. This will fundamentally change the production of content in new and interesting ways, and the result will be a lot more cheaper content. “This is going to become what TV is, and the result is that the cable and satellite companies are going to have a tough time. With the exception of sports, this is the end of cable as we know it.”

4. The LTE vs. Fiber Battle Creates Regional Revolutions in Broadband
In certain regions where the only broadband Internet option is a DSL line, LTE wireless devices and services will become the standard replacement, where LTE service is available. “In most cases you’ll be paying more, but you’ll also be getting more. This is a really interesting flip in some regions. It will be interesting to see this fight because it has a lot to do with what’s in the ground.” It will mark the start of a fight between LTE and fiber optic technology that will take a decade to resolve and what Anderson says is a “real revolution” in broadband pricing and provision.

5. Google Gets Its Mojo Back.
Google’s efforts in email, video, smartphones, maps and driverless cars have in Anderson’s opinion opened up new long-term paths for expansion at Google. Having killed off several products and services that weren’t seen as core to its operations, Google will in 2013 look a lot more focused and powerful when compared to Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, he says. “Google has turned an important corner where after all the experimentation, it has created a number of true businesses where they have a foothold and terrific products, and there are more to come.”

6. The Driverless Car Becomes a Serious and Competitive Global Project
And speaking of Google’s driverless car, that’s going to become a thing over the long term. Volvo plans to become a player. It’s not just a curiosity, it will in the future become a real market, he says.

7. eBooks Are the books
Total ebook sales in dollars will beat adult paperback sales in 2013, Anderson says, and will continue on a growth trajectory toward dominating the entire book-publishing business.

8. Enterprise IT Struggles to Achieve Very Modest Gains
“Big Data” may be a big marketing cry that keeps people talking about enterprise IT, but combined sales of hardware, software and other enterprise tech will collectively grow very little on a global basis. “The year-to-year spending increase will be very small, maybe only 1 to 2 percent, even though the companies doing the spending are sitting on trillions in cash.” One exception: Security.

9. Hacktivists Rule.
Hacktivists like Anonymous and those like them will take on an increasingly important and, Anderson argues, permanent role in forcing political entities to become more transparent. They’ll cease being annoying and actually become a longer-term part of the political and cultural landscape. The result? After struggling to keep their secrets, governments will be forced, in time, Anderson says, to become more open.

10. Supply Chain Security Becomes a Major Factor in Global Technology Purchases
“Maybe all that outsourcing wasn’t such a good idea after all” will be the thinking of many CEOs who’ve spent the last decade or more arguing that lower production costs brought about by inexpensive labor costs in China, Taiwan and other countries will cause a big re-think over security concerns. Academic researchers in the U.K. claim to have found what many people have only silently worried might be possible: An unpatchable backdoor on a military grade encryption chip built in a Taiwanese fab. Companies in what he calls “inventing nations,” exasperated by the constant theft of intellectual property that is often traced to China, will grow increasingly uneasy at their relationship with that country and look for ways to bring more production back to their own shores. A new phrase — “clean supply chains” — will gain currency in tech manufacturing circles and will amount to an admission across many industries, not just tech, that today’s supply chain arrangements are “virtually all compromised,” Anderson says. This will lead to talk of ways to relocate manufacturing operations back in the U.S. and other countries. It won’t be easy — China will retaliate against companies that say anything like this publicly. “You almost have to decide to do what Google did and all but leave the country.” Apple is already doing it. Others, he said, will follow.

German media giant Bertelsmann said Monday that it plans to create a joint venture between Random House and Pearson’s Penguin, with Bertelsmann taking a 53 percent stake in the new company and Pearson taking 47 percent. Bertelsmann and Pearson didn’t disclose the value of the joint venture, but a person familiar with the matter indicated that the equity valuation would be somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion.

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Take one of Amazon’s biggest titles for fall, actress and director Penny Marshall’s memoir “My Mother Was Nuts.” In its first four weeks on sale, it has sold just 7,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan. By comparison, actor Rob Lowe’s memoir, 2011′s “Stories I Only Tell My Friends,” published by Macmillan’s Henry Holt & Co., sold 54,000 hardcover copies in its first four weeks.

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Photo Credit: Worldreader & Jon McCormack / The Kilgoris Project Worldleader provides Amazon Kindles to kids in classrooms in Africa

The free service is being called “Whispercast for Kindle,” which is in line with the branding that Amazon has already introduced for other services that sync data across multiple devices.

Whispercast will allow teachers to manage Kindles from a central online location to set up policies, including things like blocking Facebook or Web browsing, and to prevent purchasing anything in the store. Teachers will also be able to push content down from the store. For enterprises, they can push down settings that require employees to have a password, or add personal devices owned by employees to the network.

Jay Marine, VP of Kindle at Amazon, said in an interview that lots of schools have been testing Kindle devices in the classroom, and while teachers generally liked them, there were also a lot of challenges when it came to administering and managing the devices across multiple classrooms and grades. ”We worked with them on this, and got a lot of feedback. It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” he said.

Whispercast will work on everything from the company’s lowest-end e-reader to its most expensive color-screen tablet. It will also work across any device running the company’s free Kindle application, including iOS and Android devices. In the coming months, Amazon hopes to expand the service to support the distribution of Kindle Fire applications. Of course, if Amazon can create tools that make it easy for large organizations to buy Kindles, it may result in more sales of the devices and content — so all this good work will eventually pay off.

In a release, Amazon says that Clearwater High School started off using 2,000 Kindles two and a half years ago, and now is using them in 122 schools in the district. Separately, a nonprofit organization called Worldreader was one of the first to try out the technology, and is now using Whispercast to wirelessly deliver more than 200,000 e-books to children in sub-Saharan Africa, as part of the literacy program.

Marine said that hundreds of schools are beta-testing Whispercast, and that they are trying to reach out to other schools that are using Kindles without their knowledge. “They happened without us, to be honest,” he said, in regards to the rollouts in some schools. “And, after the fact, we tried to help them through it and learn from them.”

The settlement disclosed Thursday allows U.S. publishers to remove digitized titles from the Google Library Project if they want. The settlement also “acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders.” Court approval isn’t necessary.

The Authors Guild is still pursuing the legal case.

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