From Kill Zone:
What goes around comes around. And around. And around.
So goes the tale of Barnes & Noble.
The bookseller was founded in New York in 1886 as Arthur Hinds & Company. A clerk named Gilbert Clifford Noble rose to partnership and soon changed the name to Hinds & Noble. In 1917, Noble partnered with William Barnes to become Barnes & Noble.
. . . .
Big fish eat little fish. To the dismay of readers, few indie minnows survived B&N’s dominance.
“Barnes & Noble was perceived as not just the enemy,” said a former chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, which represents indie shops, told the New York Times, “but as being everything about corporate book selling that was wrong.”
. . . .
Then…along came a whale named Amazon.
Online book sales thrived while physical bookstores dropped by the wayside. The juggernaut of Amazon led to mergers and bankruptcies of sizable chains like Waldenbooks, Crown, and B. Dalton. In 2011, Borders filed bankruptcy, leaving B&N the sole remaining national bookstore chain.
Amazon was fast gaining ground.
In 2010, B&N introduced the Nook e-reader to compete with Kindle but it never came close to Kindle’s success. Stores added coffee shops, free wi-fi, gifts, and non-book merchandise, hoping to survive. Nothing worked. Sales dropped, employees were fired, stores closed.
Per Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker:
“By 2018 the company was in total collapse. Barnes & Noble lost $18 million that year, and fired 1,800 full time employees—in essence shifting almost all store operations to part time staff. Around that same time, the company fired its CEO due to sexual harassment claims.”
The bookseller that had put so many other bookstores out of business appeared ready to join their fate.
Enter James Daunt. The 59-year-old former banker and business exec had founded Daunt Books and turned around Waterstone’s, a British bookseller that had once languished in similar straits to B&N. In 2019, he took the helm as B&N’s CEO and set out to rescue the floundering chain.
. . . .
Y’know, like mom-and-pop indie bookstores used to do.
Managers have free rein to stock books by local authors, including good-quality self-published ones, and those of regional interest. They no longer have to stock books chosen by a single head buyer from thousands of miles away.
A few months ago, I visited B&N in Missoula, Montana. The manager not only ordered some of my books, she is also happy to host an in-person event later this year.
B&N stores are now becoming more like the indie bookstores they used to put out of business.
Daunt’s strategies are succeeding. In 2023, B&N plans to open 30 new stores. Ironically, some will take over the same locations where Amazon’s experimental physical bookstores failed.
. . . .
What’s coming around now for B&N is good news for readers. It also gives a boost to local authors who want to see their books on real shelves.
Link to the rest at Kill Zone and thanks to H. for the tip.
As PG has noted before, Barnes & Noble is no longer a publicly-held company.
The federal securities laws require publicly held companies that file reports with the SEC to submit financial statements that are accurate, truthful, and complete and prepared according to a set of accounting standards called “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” (or “GAAP”)
From the United States Securities and Exchange Commission
As PG has mentioned before, Barnes & Noble is currently owned by a hedge fund and is not and has not for quite a long time been publicly traded nor has it posted any audited financial information.
Barnes & Noble is free to spread happy talk about it’s health and future without violating any laws. Per the Barnes & Noble website,
The Company operates approximately 600 Barnes & Noble bookstores across the United States
PG doesn’t think Barnes & Noble has released any exact number for its store locations for a long time. One online source puts the number of stores at 588.
Per Statista, Barnes & Noble had 72I stores in 2008. The Statista data show that Barnes & Noble had about 100 more stores in 2008 than it’s claiming in 2023. Some of the 588 current Barnes & Noble stores are in airports, FWIW.
Worth noting is that said number isn’t exactly a matter of the company being on the upswing after a bad rough patch–the number of stores has decreased every year since 2008.
Agreed.
As I have said, if Amazon closed it’s bookstores it is very likely because they were not making enough money to make them worthwhile.
Also, as Jane F. has pointed out elsewhere, B&N are abandoning leases on large properties and opening smaller stores. The closed Amazon stores are a smaller footprint. Smaller stores can afford to sell fewer books. Rather than lease a barn and try to sell enough books to keep it afloat, they lease a garage that is more manageable.
One wonders how this affects a goal of selling the chain. Does occupying less space and selling fewer books, but being somewhat profitable for a change, make them look good enough when they are put on the block?