Name: Inside CEO James Daunt’s Plan To Save Barnes & Noble | Behind The Business
Uploaded: 2026-08-03
Duration: 8 min 21 s
Description: Barnes & Noble was once seen as another casualty of Amazon. Today, it’s expanded to over 700 stores nationwide. In this episode, Fortune’s Phil Wahba explores how CEO James Daunt’s plan to save America’s biggest book chain by making it cool again.

Barnes & Noble was once seen as another casualty of Amazon. Today, it’s expanded to over 700 stores nationwide. In this episode, Fortune’s Phil Wahba explores how CEO James Daunt’s plan to save America’s biggest book chain by making it cool again. 

Inside CEO James Daunt’s Plan To Save Barnes & Noble | Behind The Business

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Remember how everyone thought Barnes and Noble was dying just a few years ago. America's largest book retailer was in rough shape. The Barnes and Noble store in Prudential Center will soon close for good. A major bookstore to close at an Omaha location this weekend. By 2020, Amazon captured over half of all. print book sales and 80% of the e-book market, decimating traditional brick and mortar bookstores. There was a decade of declining store numbers, lots and lots of closures, no openings. Today, the chain is pulling off one of the most unexpected turnarounds in retail history. What we're doing is opening up stores again in communities. Will their growth hit a wall? Barnes and Noble is expanding. As of July 2026, the book retailer had opened 20 new stores so far, with more planned this year. The footprint currently stands at 717 locations, 90 more than in 2019. We'll open up 35,000 square foot stores, we'll open up less large stores, we'll open an 8000 square foot store in a mall. We're doing that because we're putting bookstores back into place. And back into communities that will appreciate a bookstore. During the 2010s, Barnes and Noble saw massive sales declines, 100 store closures, six different CEOs, and a $1 billion loss on its Nook Reader, a device to compete with Amazon's Kindle. Then investment firm Elliott Advisors acquired the company for nearly $700 million in 2019, bringing in James Dant as CEO. There are books here that you know are really good and therefore you will read the others and is that a consistency ology. When you took the reins of this company, it was in rough shape. As you assessed the business, what were you thinking? It's relatively straightforward for me because I've been a bookseller for 30 years at that point, um. Uh, longer, so I simply wanted to make these stores really good again, and, and one sets on a series of very slow and incremental processes to do that. Dan started out as an investment banker in New York in the 1980s. He left banking to launch Dant Books in 1990, building it to a highly successful and beloved 10 location chain in the UK. Dan and many other independent bookstores have that cool factor. Does Barnes and Noble need to have some of that cool factor, or is it, is it a different animal, a different concept entirely? Barnes and Noble can be extremely cool, but it's definitely a different sort of cool. And the challenge for us is how do we do it appropriately in each place in which we are, and that I think we're able to do increasingly well at the moment. Every display in their Union Square store in Manhattan feels thought out to the smallest detail. These are a lot of like conversation starters, economics, politics. for this local section, there's a lot of cookbooks. There's cookbooks. I've bought that for somebody. It's so cute. Shops, yeah, yeah. The inventory is hyper curated for New York customers, reflecting social trends, local culture, and real-time demand. A lot of our tables are smaller. They're meant to kind of be little stops along your way to points of interest as you're kind of weaving your way through the store. Um, we love when people spend time in the stacks and pull things out and find something that may be really old but is new to them. A 2025 study showed foot traffic in brick and mortar bookstores climbed 12% year over year, while Studies showed independent bookstore accounts surged by nearly 90% that same year. So romance has been a booming category over the last few years. It really is landing on that escapism and happily ever after that's working across a lot of different genres. For Barnes and Noble, the wins have come from trying to feel like your neighborhood bookstore. What would you say is the biggest difference in how stores are run today versus When you were a rookie, we were more a traditional retailer. We were really operating at like a big box Target or a Walmart, and I was essentially told to kind of like turn my brain off when I came to work and put this book here on this date at this time and then replace it with this book, whereas now. We've really moved to this model of being a place that's bookseller led and being able to curate interesting tables and it takes a lot more brainpower in the best possible way that we can kind of create these different local tables and local approach but also have some interesting kind of deeper cuts. Don's strategy was simple build hyperlocalization into the chain's corporate playbook. He eliminated the pay for display model, empowering each store to curate based on local demand rather than publisher co op dollars. Stores now control the visual merchandizing, such as handwritten staff recommendations and their own social media accounts. How do you get the benefits of these economies of scale, but at the same time have this flexible size? Well, we used to have a model which involved from a Home Office dictating very precisely what every store did, attached to a lot of commercial arrangements with publishers. Just to have particular books in particular places and a very uniform presentation for which you needed a uniform size of store. We've abandoned that 100%. So now each store curates its own assortment, reorders its own books, does each to their own, um, and we encourage and develop and promote and train against how do you do that well. But that also means we don't really care what size it is, we don't care what shape it is, because each store is doing its own thing. And that's liberated us now to have different sized stores doing different things. We can see what they're trying to do here. Yeah, you then want to pick it up and then it's in your pile and off you go. Now he's applying the Daunt playbook to the US market on a much larger scale. So now you've, of course, experienced uh American consumers as well as British. How are they different? American consumers are wonderful because they buy enormous amounts of books. Individually they buy more than a UK customer does. The American consumer, of course, is world famous in all forms of retail, but it applies also to bookselling. And so the growth for you will come from what, from getting more people to just buy more books? Yeah, I mean the book market is not a finite one. There are retail sectors if one person sells plus one. Another person has to sell -1. It's a fixed market. That isn't the case with books at all, particularly the way in which people buy books in a bookstore. If you come into a bookstore, you're going to be inspired, you're going to come in for one book, you're going to walk out with 3. That's the way it works. The better our bookstores, the more books are sold, the larger the market expands, but it's not eating the share of somebody else. It's not a zero-sum game at all. And now Wall Street is taking notice. There have been media reports of a possible IPO. How do you think the company would be managed differently if it were public? We are trying to run really good bookstores, and most of that effort is being done at the local level. I think what goes on in New York, any which way doesn't make much difference. Uh, what matters to us is what's going on at the local level, how are we able to support them? How are they able to improve things, and that's a steady, incremental process. I'm a great believer in physical bookstores, um, and I have my own bookstores. I then the equivalent in the United Kingdom of Barnes and Noble, and we sorted that out very quickly and made those really nice bookstores. I think to the benefit of the whole book trade and bookselling as a whole. And then obviously with Barnes and Noble being the last man effectively standing here in in the United States, it was very, very important for bookselling as a whole, but that continued to be the case. Um, but we're just really just bringing these principles first, small bookstore to large chain to even larger chain, um, and, and it's all based and founded on the core principle of what makes a great bookstore.