As former Barnes & Noble Inc. (NYSE: BKS) CEO William Lynch took the fall for the failure of the company’s e-commerce business, the man who controls the company — Leonard Riggio — got to stay. Riggio has been either the de facto or real chief executive since he founded the company in 1986. The failure of the company rests at his feet, and only his.

Riggio calls himself executive chairman. He holds 29.8% of the Barnes & Noble shares. An indication of how poorly the company has done long term is that its share price has fallen 20% in the past decade while the S&P has risen 60% — a stunningly poor performance. The reasons for the sell-off are simple. Riggio bungled completely when it came to the world of e-commerce.

Many retailers can claim they fairly missed what the early success of online retail meant. However, among the first and eventually the most dominant companies was Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), which began its life as an online bookstore. Riggio had the chance to clip Amazon’s wings at the start because of his established brand and large physical distribution system. To say that Barnes & Noble faltered is an understatement.

Riggio was the only executive in the country who could have seen Amazon coming. He did not. Barnes & Noble paid a horrible price. Ultimately, Riggio’s flat-footed response has destroyed the company he founded.

Many analysts say that Barnes & Noble’s most notable error was its failure to launch an e-reader to immediately to compete with Amazon’s Kindle. The Nook made it into the market late, which undermined Barnes & Noble’s prospects. However, that evaluation does not take into account the point at which Barnes & Noble fell too far behind Amazon to catch it. That juncture was years ago, when the e-reader was not even a concept. However the ease with which customers could buy books over the Internet without traveling to a store was in full flower.

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