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Nearly three years ago, Liberty Media had grand ambitions to acquire Barnes & Noble, before settling for a big stake. Now it appears that the media conglomerate has had enough.

Liberty announced on Thursday that it would sell almost its entire position in Barnes & Noble, the nation’s last major bookstore chain, removing one of the company’s major backers as it struggles to compete with Amazon and navigate the shifting landscape for books and media.

In 2011, Liberty had paid $204 million for a 17 percent stake in the bookseller. After the latest move, Liberty will have just under a 2 percent stake. The move disappointed Barnes & Noble’s other shareholders. After Liberty’s announcement, Barnes & Noble’s stock dropped sharply, and by the end of the day was down 13.52 percent, trading at $19.12 a share.

The loss of a major shareholder is the latest setback for Barnes & Noble, which has closed dozens of stores and has trouble fulfilling its digital ambitions. Five years ago, the company had a promising product with its first Nook e-reader, a device that quickly became a major competitor to the iPad from Apple and the Kindle from Amazon and grabbed more than 25 percent of the e-book market.

But the Nook’s early promise faded as the tablet space grew more crowded and Amazon undercut Barnes & Noble on price. Last summer, Barnes & Noble’s chief executive and the architect of its digital strategy, William Lynch, abruptly resigned. Nook sales dropped more than 50 percent in the most recent fiscal quarter from a year ago. Michael P. Huseby, the company’s new chief executive, said in February that it was looking for an outside partner to produce its devices in the future.

Investors have been waiting for signs that Mr. Huseby had a plan to stop the bleeding. The company has eliminated close to 200 positions in its Nook division — about a quarter of its work force — through layoffs and attrition. Its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., where Barnes & Noble engineers and designers had been dreaming up new Nook devices, have been severely depleted.

Its traditional bookstores have remained more stable, though core comparable store sales are drifting lower. Barnes & Noble executives have said that the bookseller will close about 20 of its more than 600 stores each year for the next decade.

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Liberty’s stake in the company had been considered a vote of confidence by one of the media industry’s savviest investors, the billionaire John C. Malone. But back in 2011, just before he agreed to invest in Barnes & Noble, Mr. Malone acknowledged that it was risky making a bet on the bookseller.

“It would be a bit of a flier for us, on whether or not Barnes & Noble can play competitively with the likes of Apple and Amazon in the digital transformation,” Mr. Malone said in 2011 at the Allen & Company media conference.

Both Liberty and Barnes & Noble described the move on Thursday as one that would give the embattled retailer more room to plot its future. When the stock sale closes on Tuesday, Liberty will lose the right to keep two representatives on the Barnes & Noble board. Gregory B. Maffei, the conglomerate’s chief executive, will step down, though Mark Carleton, a senior vice president, will stay on as a director.

“By reducing our preferred position and eliminating some of our related rights, Barnes & Noble will gain greater flexibility to accomplish their strategic objectives,” Mr. Maffei said in a statement.

The investment in Barnes & Noble was always something of an outlier for Mr. Malone and Liberty. Though Liberty continues to own a range of media assets, including the Atlanta Braves baseball team and a major stake in the ticket seller Live Nation Entertainment, the company’s notable focus has been the cable television business.

Liberty’s investment in Barnes & Noble came as the bookseller’s Nook e-reader business showed potential. But after the Nook failed to take off, efforts to split off the digital business from the company’s retail stores faltered and Liberty concluded it had little interest in owning a stake in a declining brick and mortar operation.

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The retrenchment comes as Mr. Malone, 73, is trying to return to his roots. Last year, Liberty Media acquired a stake in Charter Communications, a regional cable operator. Charter subsequently pursued a hostile takeover of Time Warner Cable, the country’s second-largest cable operator.

Had Charter succeeded, Mr. Malone, once known as the King of Cable, might have been on his way toward reclaiming the throne. But after months of pursuit, Charter was outflanked by Comcast, the country’s largest cable operator, which swooped in with a $45 billion offer for Time Warner Cable.

Though Charter lost out in its pursuit of Time Warner Cable, it may still look to acquire other cable assets, including the three million subscribers Comcast has pledged to divest itself of.

And in Europe, Mr. Malone is also on the prowl for cable assets. Liberty Global, which he controls, has emerged as the most influential pay television company on the Continent. Earlier this year, Liberty Global agreed to buy Dutch cable operator Ziggo, adding to its stable of European cable operators, which also includes Telenet in Belgium and Virgin Media in Britain.

On Thursday, Leonard Riggio, Barnes & Noble’s chairman, said that while Liberty had been a strong supporter of the retailer, the company would now have a greater ability to pursue unstated “various strategic options.”

Liberty’s exit could open the door for Barnes & Noble to be sold entirely or split it up, options that executives have been considering for some time.