For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s.

“There’s been a long series of pressures,” said David Schick, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore. “The market has not been kind to bookstores, and it’s for new reasons like competition with Apple and Amazon, and it’s for old reasons, like what we believe has been a decline in reading for the last 20 years. Americans have devoted less of what we call media time to books.”

But Barnes & Noble has made efforts to adapt to the changing landscape. Last year, it announced that it had acquired Fictionwise, an online e-book retailer. In March, the company promoted William Lynch, then the head of its Web division, to chief executive, signaling that it was pouring its efforts into the growing digital side of the business.

It has tried to compete with Amazon and Apple in the e-reader market by opening its own e-bookstore last summer, and by introducing its own device, the Nook, with versions selling for $149 and $199, as an alternative to the Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad. In September, it will open 1,000-square-foot boutiques within its stores to promote the Nook.

One analyst said that consumers had been moving away from physical bookstores in favor of buying books online or at other retail outlets. “They might pick up a book when they’re buying hand sanitizer or Band-Aids, rather than actually seeking out a bookstore as a destination and then buying a book at that point,” said Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, which provides research and advice to publishers. “A lot of independents are figuring it out one bookstore at a time, and that’s what the Barnes & Nobles of the world have to do.”