NEW YORK CITY—Barnes & Noble said Wednesday it would separate its retail and Nook electronic reader businesses, with an eye toward completing the separation by the first quarter of calendar 2015. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the move followed years of urging byinvestors and analysts alike.

In view of positive full-year results for fiscal 2014, “We believe we are now in a better position to begin in earnest those steps necessary to accomplish a separation of NOOK Media and Barnes & Noble Retail,” says Michael P. Huseby, B&N's CEO. “We have determined that these businesses will have the best chance of optimizing shareholder value if they are capitalized and operated separately. We fully expect that our Retail and NOOK Media businesses will continue to have long-term, successful business relationships with each other after separation.”

Those full-year results for the year ended May 3 included EBITDA of $251 million, “the highest it's been in four years,” Huseby says. Helping drive the EBITDA growth, however, was a narrowing of the FY loss by the Nook platform, from $480.4 million in fiscal 2013 to $217.6 million in the most recent fiscal year as it continues to compete with Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad. B&N said Wednesday that much of the difference in Nook EBITDA stemmed from Nook-related inventory charges of $222 million for the year prior.