After over a decade of struggle, Barnes & Noble has been turning a new leaf. The bookstore retailer opened 16 new stores last year and made promises to open 30 more in 2023.
The revamp began nearly four years ago when Elliott Management, a hedge fund, took the New York-based book company private for approximately $683 million. At the time, the national chain had lost the battle against Amazon.com, which started as an online book marketplace, as The Associated Press reported.
A new CEO, James Daunt, was put in charge, picking apart the establishment and its 627 stores. But, as Fast Company reported, the publishing industry is now rooting for this underdog corporation, which was once the villain of the story.
Villain turned hero
Back in the ’70s, Leonard Riggio acquired a century-old Manhattan bookstore and set his sights on making it a nationwide phenomenon. By 1987, Barnes & Noble had 797 locations, making it the second-largest bookseller — and they were sometimes accused of bullying mom-and-pop booksellers out of business.
Per The New York Times, the American Booksellers Association, which represented independent bookstores, filed an antitrust lawsuit in the late ’90s.
“There was a period where the competition was pretty ugly,” said Oren J. Teicher, a former chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, told the Times. “Barnes & Noble was perceived as not just the enemy, but as being everything about corporate book selling that was wrong.”
No one expected Amazon to emerge and become the common enemy. Offering bigger discounts and a near-infinite selection of books made it a tough competitor. Amazon remained firmly in control, until Daunt, a former banker, stepped in with a new vision for Barnes & Noble.
A British businessman takes over
Daunt founded Daunt Books in 1990. This six-store chain in London led him to become the managing director of Waterstones, a big box book retailer in the United Kingdom. He was even credited with saving it.
When taking over as CEO of Barnes & Noble in 2019, the businessman was clear on taking cues from the success of Waterstones. Daunte wanted to tailor each store to the local market, as The Associated Press reported at the time.
“In chain bookselling, you need to try and get the best store for each location,” Daunt said. “What works in Jacksonville, Florida, isn’t necessarily going to work in Hawaii.”
Since then, he has given local store managers more say, ended promotions of publisher-pushed books that take up prime spots, and cleaned up the selection in stock. Per Axios, he even used pandemic lockdowns as a time to remodel and reorganize.
“We sort of take three steps forward and then one step back,” Daunt told the Times in a recent interview. “The forward is my constantly encouraging and pushing for the stores themselves to have the complete freedom to do absolutely whatever they want — how they display their books, price their books, sort their sections, anything. Those freedoms are difficult if you lived in a very straitjacketed world where everything was dictated to you.”
The future of Barnes & Noble?
The company’s financials aren’t visible, but Daunt claims that the last few years have been good for business. He even seems optimistic for the future, with or without the involvement of e-books.
“The physical book is just a huge repository of pleasure. It’s hugely enjoyable to select a book in a nice bookstore that respects books. That’s just a real rush if it’s done nicely,” he told the Times.
“As far as I was concerned, the e-reader would have people reading more, and the more people read, the more physical books they’d end up buying.”