A magazine subscription and a college textbook appear to belong to different worlds. One competes for your leisure; the other has an assignment attached. Jonathan Shar has worked on both sides of that distinction. His career keeps returning to a deceptively ordinary question: how does something worth reading reach the person who needs it?
That question has carried him through Time Inc., CNNMoney, Barnes & Noble’s NOOK business and Akademos. Since June 2024, it has occupied him as chief executive of Barnes & Noble Education. The packaging has changed several times. The complications have multiplied. On campus, the reader also has a timetable, a required edition and a bill.
The bookstore is an unusually revealing place to see those demands collide. A sweatshirt can wait for the next home game. Chapter one tends to be less accommodating. Shar’s work sits at that meeting point between the familiar pleasures of retail and the rather firmer obligations of an academic calendar.
A reader is never just a transaction
Shar grew up in Durham, New Hampshire, with both parents working at the University of New Hampshire. He studied economics at Tufts, then worked as an analyst at KPMG before earning his Michigan MBA in 1995. Campus life preceded his career in campus commerce.
At Michigan’s student newspaper, the Monroe Street Journal, he wrote sports and sold advertising. He later secured a Time Inc. internship after writing to a hiring vice president. The young writer had also taken a seat on the commercial side of the desk.
Consumer marketing became his professional territory. At Time Inc., his roles included director of consumer marketing for the FORTUNE Magazine Group and vice president of consumer marketing for Sports Illustrated Group. These jobs put him close to a central publishing problem: a title’s editorial identity must be matched by a practical way to attract and retain readers.
It is useful preparation for any business where owning a product and persuading someone to use it are separate achievements. A publication can be admired without being bought. A service can be available without being convenient. The distance between those conditions is where a marketing executive earns the salary.
When the newsstand moved inside a screen
In October 2007, Shar was named general manager of CNNMoney.com. He had been overseeing consumer franchises at Sports Illustrated Group, including Sports Illustrated, SI for Kids and Golf. The move brought him into the daily workings of a digital news business.
One glimpse of that work survives in a 2008 announcement by GigaOM founder Om Malik. His network agreed to supply technology coverage to CNNMoney.com and Fortune.com. Malik thanked Shar and editor Chris Peacock for helping arrange the partnership. The agreement connected an established financial news audience with a growing specialist publisher.
There is something instructive in that small piece of business history. Distribution can grow through an agreement as readily as through a new product. A useful partnership gives one organization relevant material and another a route to readers. Much of the work happens before anyone opens a browser.
Mobile was another part of the brief. During his CNNMoney tenure, Shar discussed plans for iPhone-optimized sites and iPhone and BlackBerry applications. The question was already shifting from which publication someone read to where and how they would read it. A desktop audience could no longer describe the whole audience.
In 2010 he moved to Barnes & Noble, initially as general manager of digital newsstand and emerging content. His later NOOK Digital Content responsibilities encompassed newsstand, video and apps, with business development, product development and marketing under his remit. The digital shelf needed agreements, an assortment and a reason for people to return.
Read this sequence as a career in distribution and it becomes easier to follow. The magazine, website and device each put a different set of decisions between the material and its audience. A new screen does not abolish the old commercial questions. It gives them a new place to sit.
The campus has its own clock
Akademos appointed Shar chief marketing officer in 2014. Its business supplied online bookstore services, digital learning materials and analytics to colleges and universities. His responsibilities covered student and institutional sales and marketing. He was now working with two related audiences: the people obtaining the materials and the institutions choosing the service.
He described the attraction as an opportunity to “make a difference in the cost of educating hundreds of thousands of students nationwide.” The ambition was explicit well before his eventual appointment as BNED’s chief executive. Affordability was part of the job he had chosen.
BNED hired him in July 2018 for a newly created senior vice president role in revenue and product development. The brief crossed business segments, including digital student services, courseware, analytics and access programs. Michael Huseby, then chairman and CEO, hired him to help develop more integrated digital offerings.
Shar subsequently led BNED Retail and became president of Barnes & Noble College in 2021. Those responsibilities joined physical campus stores to their e-commerce operations. His current company biography places both sides of that operation in the run-up to his CEO appointment.
“Our mission is to facilitate the student academic journey.”
Jonathan Shar
First Day Complete gives that broad ambition a specific operating form. Required physical and digital course materials are bundled into tuition or a course charge. Delivery is intended before the first class. Physical materials can be collected or shipped; digital materials are made available through the institution’s learning management system.
That arrangement changes the work behind the purchase. Faculty selections, student requirements and delivery have to line up before the term starts. The apparent simplicity of a bundle depends on many separate decisions being right. A student sees a book or an access link; the operator has to manage the route that produced it.
The company advertises average savings of 35 to 50 percent for the program. That is its stated program average, rather than a guarantee about any individual student’s bill. The useful question for a particular campus remains practical: how does the arrangement fit its courses, costs and students?
In 2022, BNED anticipated offering First Day Complete through 112 campus stores, covering approximately 547,000 undergraduates. Its student survey that spring drew 2,440 responses across 76 campuses. Eighty-three percent of respondents said they felt better prepared for the term. That is reported student sentiment, with a defined survey population, rather than proof that the program caused better grades.
A new title, an inherited balance sheet
Shar became CEO effective June 11, 2024, succeeding Huseby. His appointment followed a refinancing that changed the company’s financial position. The transactions raised $95 million in new equity, converted approximately $34 million of second-lien debt into equity and included a new $325 million credit facility.
The timing matters. A chief executive inherits obligations as well as opportunities. For a campus retailer, access to capital underpins the less glamorous parts of the promise: buying inventory, paying vendors and maintaining service. An attractive program still requires a business capable of delivering it.
Shar publicly thanked Huseby for his guidance when he took the job. William C. Martin, the board chairman, pointed to Shar’s experience in the business. This was an internal succession, with an executive already familiar with campus partners taking responsibility for the whole organization.
There were reporting problems to address as well. In November 2025, BNED announced the completion of an internal investigation into digital cost-of-sales accounting and released preliminary restated information. It said a former employee had made unsupported entries and that the investigation found the employee had acted alone. The episode made financial controls part of the leadership test alongside commercial execution.
The next semester is the test
For fiscal 2026, ended May 2, BNED reported net income of $16.872 million, compared with a $65.825 million loss for fiscal 2025. Its adjusted EBITDA rose to $76.513 million from $59.390 million. These are company results across a team and a business, rather than a personal score assigned to one executive.
Students expected to be reached by First Day Complete
September brought a more immediate indication of the work ahead. BNED expected First Day Complete to reach more than 1.43 million students in fall 2026, up 26 percent from the previous fall. That was an expectation, not a completed enrollment result. Shar’s stated priorities included stronger profitability, cash generation and further balance sheet improvement.
The business also remains seasonal. BNED says most sales and operating profit typically arrive in its second and third fiscal quarters, reflecting the fall and spring terms. A good early quarter is useful information; the calendar still has more to say. In this line of retail, the syllabus has considerable bargaining power.
Shar has also returned to Michigan to advise students through its alumni-in-residence program. It is a smaller expression of the same connection that gives his career its shape: educational institutions have remained part of his life while the businesses around him changed.
His next chapter will be written through repeated delivery. Institutions have to keep choosing the service. Students have to receive what their courses require. The company has to make that work economically. After magazines, websites and digital newsstands, Shar’s current problem comes with a particularly clear deadline. The class is about to begin.