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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“In 10 years we’ll have 450 to 500 stores,” said Mitchell Klipper, chief executive of Barnes & Noble’s retail group, in an interview last week. The company operated 689 retail stores as of Jan. 23, along with a separate chain of 674 college stores.

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While the revenue drop reflected in part a slight decline in the number of stores open, and lower online sales, it included an 8.2% drop in sales at stores open at least one year. Most of that was driven by lower sales of Nook digital devices, both the tablet and e-reader. Excluding Nook device sales, “core” same-store-sales fell 3.1%, because fewer consumers came to the stores.

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News Corp. is the parent of HarperCollins Publishers, a book publisher whose sales are a little smaller than Penguin’s. A combination of the two companies would create the world’s biggest consumer-book publisher, accounting for around 20% of English-language consumer-book sales, according to an industry executive.

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In contrast Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle app is already available to be downloaded free. The online retailer said in a release that “customers around the world can now download this free app and enjoy Amazon’s selection of over 1.5 million books at the best prices, including over 200,000 exclusive titles.”

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In a statement issued Tuesday evening, the nation’s largest bookstore chain said that in September it detected a problem with a PIN pad device used by customers to swipe their credit cards in one of its stores.

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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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The two companies said Monday they would offer a 4G mobile platform on tablets through a pilot program this coming school year. News Corp. also announced that its education business would be named Amplify.

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Amazon in late February stopped selling the e-books of nearly 5,000 titles distributed by the Independent Publishers Group, which represents more than 500 publishers, following a dispute over terms. Publishing terms generally cover such areas as wholesale pricing, advertising, and payment requirements.

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Apple Inc., another target of the investigation, and two publishers appear reluctant to settle on the terms sought by antitrust authorities in both the U.S. and Europe, those people said.

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The bookstore feature of J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore website went live Tuesday, enabling English-language readers to buy the digital editions of all seven Harry Potter novels — and the audiobook editions — from anywhere in the world. Editions in French, Italian, German and Spanish will be the next wave.

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On Tuesday, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said it would stop printing its namesake books, a sign of how readers in recent years have abandoned printed reference volumes for websites such as Wikipedia and Google.

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Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.

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The book retailer has been in publishing since the 1970s and expanded the effort in 2003, when it acquired Sterling for about $115 million.

Now, however, Barnes & Noble, facing intense competition from Amazon.com Inc., is recasting itself as a technology company with emphasis on its Nook e-reading devices and its Nook tablet. The sale of Sterling would allow Barnes & Noble to focus on its core businesses.

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When Amazon.com Inc. introduced its first Kindle e-reader back in November 2007, the $9.99 digital best seller was a key selling point. Today, the price of a Kindle has plummeted to under $100 — from $399 back then. But e-book prices for some popular titles have soared.

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Mr. Cuban has written a 30,000-word e-book, “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It.” Culled from blog postings Mr. Cuban has made over the years about his business career, it will be available for $2.99 through online digital-book retailers. To drive sales, Mr. Cuban plans to tap all his online followers.

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The program will be limited, at least at the beginning, in what is available to borrow. Amazon will initially offer slightly more than 5,000 titles in the library, including more than 100 current and former national bestsellers, such as Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” None of the six largest publishers in the U.S. is participating.

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The move follows the Sept. 29 disclosure by DC Entertainment that it struck an exclusive agreement with Amazon.com Inc. to make the titles available for Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet, expected to ship Nov. 15. The books include “Watchmen,” “Batman: Arkham City” and “Superman: Earth One.”

Barnes & Noble, which later this month is expected to introduce a new Nook tablet, said it made the decision to remove the titles from its consumer stores on Thursday. Barnes & Noble has previously stated that it expects to be able to sell all formats of all titles that it stocks. The company said it hasn’t take such an action in the past.

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As physical book sales fall, publishers’ fixed costs are becoming more cumbersome. One area major publishers can cushion the blow is by keeping e-book prices higher. “If e-book prices land at 99 cents in the future we’re not going to be in good shape,” said one New York publishing executive, who asked not to be identified.

Indeed, e-book prices on many new national best sellers are higher today than they were at the start of last year.

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As reading moves ever faster from hardcovers and paperbacks to electronic gadgets, the retailer is attempting to reinvent itself as a seller of book downloads, reading devices and apps.

The shift was never clearer than last January, when a small group of experienced book buyers at the company was called in and dismissed. Barnes & Noble’s buyers were once book-selling royalty, minititans whose taste played a pivotal role in deciding which books danced up the charts.

For the bookseller there was little choice. It needed to invest in the future.

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Bids for Borders were due at 5:00 p.m. EDT Sunday ahead of a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday.

Still, Borders is likely to entertain offers right up until the scheduled auction in the hopes a white knight will emerge to save the chain.

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The imprint, Montlake Romance, will publish digital, physical and audio books and launch with an original new work, Connie Brockway’s “The Other Guy’s Bride,” this fall.

In an interview, Jeff Belle, vice president of Amazon Publishing, said the online retailer will eventually publish books in other genres, including thrillers, mysteries and science fiction.

“Our customers are voracious readers of genre fiction, and romance is one of the biggest and fastest growing categories,” said Mr. Belle.

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Amazon.com Inc.’s top 50 digital best-seller list featured 15 books priced at $5 or less on Wednesday afternoon. Louisville businessman John Locke, for example, a part-time thriller writer whose signature series features a former CIA assassin, claimed seven of those titles, all priced at 99 cents.

“They’re training their customers away from brand name authors and are instead creating visibility for self-published titles,” one senior publishing executive who asked not to be identified, says of Amazon.

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The works, aimed at children 3 to 8 years old, include picture books, novels and a selection of enhanced editions of classics, such as “Jamberry,” the tale of a boy and a bear who have a good time together finding berries.

An estimated 12,000 chapter books, among the largest digital collections for young readers, is expected to be available at NookKids.com by late Sunday. In addition, 100 or so picture books will be available in mid-November, while about 30 enhanced picture books will be available by the end of the year, or early in 2011. The collection, also available online at BarnesandNoble.com, will be accessible by year end via a Nook Kids app for Apple Inc.’s iPad and other devices.

Nook Kids represents a crucial effort by the nation’s largest bookstore chain to establish itself with children and their parents as a digital e-book leader.

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“Her project was one of the most exemplary in the last decade or so,” said Jed Rasula, who has taught in the English department at the University of Georgia since 2001. “I certainly thought she’d find a New York publisher.”

But the major New York publishers passed on “Sleight,” a novel about two sisters trained in a fictional art form. Coffee House Press in Minneapolis, a small independent publisher, now plans to publish the book, offering Ms. Kaschock an advance of about $3,500—a small fraction of the typical advances once paid by the major publishing houses.

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