How Barnes and Noble made a comeback by revitalizing its philosophy

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Last year, Barnes & Noble opened nearly 60 stores around the country and plans for 60 more to open in 2025. It’s the latest twist in a long-running saga for a company that’s been a bellwether for the book business.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown continues our ongoing reporting on the book industry, part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

James Daunt, CEO, Barnes & Noble: It’s recognizably Barnes & Noble because there are lots and lots of books piled high, but it looks very different.

Jeffrey Brown: A pre-opening walk through a Barnes & Noble bookstore, a maze of small rooms and pathways with company CEO James Daunt.

James Daunt: When you’re very full, as this store often will be, it’s creating space for people to drop into.

Jeffrey Brown: This store on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is just a-year-old. It’s part of a large nationwide chain, but, crucially for Daunt, has its own look and feel.

James Daunt: The key insight that I have is that it is about the bookselling team and it’s about how you take all of this huge number of books and arrange them and display them in a manner which really engages with your local community.

The insight that gives me in terms of running lots of bookstores is, leave it to the teams in each store. The vast majority of them will do it exceptionally well, and your stores will become better and busier and the business will thrive.

Jeffrey Brown: Barnes & Noble’s beginnings can be traced to 1873, but it was in 1971 that Leonard Riggio acquired its trade name and flagship Manhattan store and grew the company into the nation’s largest bookseller, offering steep discounts and a huge selection, changing the landscape for how and where Americans bought books, eventually with more than 700 superstores all with the same titles and design.

Actors: One, two, three, four!

Tom Hanks, Actor: We don’t want this superstore.

Jeffrey Brown: Its success, along with Borders, put hundreds of smaller independents out of business, captured in Nora Ephron’s 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail.”

Meg Ryan, Actress: Can we save the Shop Around the Corner?

Actors: Yes!

Jeffrey Brown: But Amazon, offering even steeper discounts and more supply, nearly killed off Barnes & Noble, which by the time Daunt arrived had closed hundreds of stores around the country.

James Daunt: Obviously, we have come back from the brink.

Jeffrey Brown: The brink meaning the end?

James Daunt: Yes. I mean, the business was a public company. It was sold really pretty much for the value of the books that were sitting on its shelves. So that’s not a really very good sign of health.

The job that I had was to restore it as a bookseller.

Jeffrey Brown: Daunt brought an unusual pedigree. He’d launched Daunt Books in 1990 as an independent bookseller in a gorgeous London setting that became a destination for book lovers.

In 2011 he was hired to rescue Waterstones, Britain’s largest chain bookstore, then near bankruptcy and, in 2019, after hedge fund company Elliott Advisors bought Barnes & Noble, to attempt the same here.

His success has gained attention, as, in recent years, Barnes & Noble began to open stores all over the country, even reopening a flagship Washington, D.C., store that had closed in 2012.

The new philosophy, have stores act and feel like an independent local shop.

Victoria Harty, assistant manager at this Upper West Side Manhattan store, has worked for Barnes & Noble for more than 10 years.

Victoria Harty, Assistant Store Manager, Barnes & Noble: We used to be told what table to do, how to curate it, where that table should go, what angle that table should be on, and what discount that table potentially is going to have.

Jeffrey Brown: Angle of…

Victoria Harty: Angle of the table. So, it was very, very regimented. There was no thought.

Jeffrey Brown: These days, Harty and her counterparts see themselves as curators of individual tables and shelves, as well as the store itself, paying more attention to local consumers and to social media, most of all, TikTok’s BookTok.

Victoria Harty: It was a lot of young readers, almost this generation that was coming into physical bookstores looking for books. So what I started to do with that was look at those titles, like what they were coming in for, and how do you take that one title and curate a display around it?

Like, what are those books that are similar, pairing them together and creating a bigger display from it?

Jeffrey Brown: So fervent in his approach is Daunt that he makes Amazon, which today accounts for more than 50 percent of the market, sound like an ally.

James Daunt: I actually see Amazon as being a massive positive for what it is to be a great bookseller.

Jeffrey Brown: How can it be a massive positive if it’s taking 50 percent of the market?

James Daunt: What it’s taken is all the boring books out of our stores. We used to have great, huge medical sections that taught doctors and nurses and all the other professionals. But those books are very boring.

No more. You go onto Amazon, bump, it arrives through your letter box three minutes later.

Jeffrey Brown: But surely people go to Amazon for more than just what you’re calling the boring books?

James Daunt: Of course they do. And if you buy Percival Everett’s “James” from Amazon, it’s the same Percival Everett I will sell you. But if you come into this store to buy it, you will come in, you will be surrounded by other books, which you can browse and engage with.

Almost certainly you, will have another fellow customer saying, oh, have you read this by him? Have you read that? You will have an experience. And when you walk out of the store with it in your bag, it will lift you. It’s the same book, but I promise you it’s a better book and the reading of it will be more pleasurable because you bought it in a bookstore.

Jeffrey Brown: That strategy applies to the nation’s independent bookstores too, of course. In fact, Barnes & Noble recently acquired one of them, Denver’s much-loved, but bankrupt, Tattered Cover, a move being watched closely, locally and beyond.

Daunt says this.

James Daunt: Bookstores get into trouble. What we now do as a chain is, we rescue them. We give them a safe home. We don’t change them. We don’t change the people. We don’t change the name. But we give them the structure of the large chain.

Jeffrey Brown: An earlier plotline in this long saga was, Barnes & Noble is killing independents. Now, they can coexist?

James Daunt: I think bookstores do coexist. I’m — my instincts are that of an independent bookseller. I would never open up in a location where I believed that I was threatening an independent bookseller ever, because that’s totally unnecessary.

We’re in this vast country of ours with far too few bookstores. So — but it isn’t a zero-sum game.

Jeffrey Brown: It is a business, though, and Daunt has to answer to the company’s owners. The plot of this story, that is, is still being written.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.