WEEKEND READ:How James Daunt Brought Barnes & Noble Back From the Brink

• NEW YORK, 29 AUGUST 2026, 10:00 BST — EBM NEWS DESK ANALYSIS — By Nick Staunton

For much of the past decade, Barnes & Noble looked like a company waiting for its final chapter. Amazon had transformed the economics of bookselling, Borders had collapsed and the arrival of e-books appeared to confirm the widely held belief that the traditional bookshop was becoming an expensive relic of the pre-digital age. Barnes & Noble survived, but survival was increasingly mistaken for strategy. Sales fell, stores closed and a succession of management changes did little to resolve a more fundamental problem: the largest bookselling chain in the United States had gradually forgotten what made people want to visit a bookshop in the first place.

That is what made the arrival of James Daunt in 2019 such an unusual corporate gamble. Elliott Management, which had acquired Barnes & Noble, did not appoint a conventional American retail executive with a plan to accelerate e-commerce, centralise operations or find a technological answer to Amazon. Instead, it turned to a British bookseller who had spent much of his career arguing for precisely the opposite approach: give more authority to the people closest to the customer and make large chains behave, wherever possible, like good independent bookshops.

Seven years later, the results have become one of the more remarkable retail turnarounds of the decade. Barnes & Noble ended 2025 with 702 outlets and is planning another substantial programme of openings in 2026, with Daunt arguing that the strength of existing stores has given the company confidence to continue expanding. For a business that only a few years ago was routinely presented as another victim of Amazon’s apparently unstoppable rise, the reversal has been striking.

The story matters beyond the book trade. It raises a more uncomfortable question for many large businesses: how often does the pursuit of efficiency, standardisation and central control slowly destroy the very qualities that customers valued?

A chain that had become too much like a chain

When Daunt took over, Barnes & Noble was not short of scale. What it lacked was distinction. The business had spent years operating according to a familiar corporate model in which stores were expected to follow centrally determined plans, stock broadly similar ranges and devote prominent space to books selected through commercial arrangements negotiated far from the shop floor. The result, in Daunt’s view, was a network of increasingly uniform stores that often felt less like places of discovery and more like large retail outlets selling the same products in the same way.

That might work for many categories. It is far less effective when the customer experience depends on curiosity.

A good bookshop is not simply a distribution point for products. People walk in without necessarily knowing what they want. They browse shelves, notice an unfamiliar cover, pick up a recommendation or ask somebody behind the counter for advice. The experience is partly transactional, but it is also personal and unpredictable. Amazon could offer almost limitless choice and extraordinary convenience, but it could not easily replicate the pleasure of discovering a book in a shop designed by people who understood the readers walking through the door.

Daunt had spent much of his career developing exactly that philosophy. After leaving investment banking, he founded Daunt Books in London and later led the revival of Waterstones, the British chain that had itself faced many of the same problems as Barnes & Noble. His success at Waterstones made him an obvious candidate when Elliott acquired the American business, but his strategy remained counterintuitive for a company of Barnes & Noble’s size.

Rather than impose a tighter central model, he began dismantling one.

Putting the booksellers back in charge

The central principle of the turnaround was decentralisation. Barnes & Noble gave individual stores and regional teams far greater discretion over what they stocked, what they displayed and how they responded to the communities around them. The assumption was straightforward: readers in Manhattan do not necessarily buy the same books as readers in Michigan, Texas or California, and a national chain should not pretend that they do.

Daunt also moved away from the long-established practice under which publishers could secure prominent display space across the chain through commercial arrangements. The system created predictable revenue, but it also encouraged sameness. Stores were often displaying the same books, in the same places, regardless of whether those titles reflected local demand.

The new approach was more complicated to manage but more faithful to what a bookshop was supposed to be. Individual stores could curate their ranges more actively and reorder according to what customers were actually buying. Barnes & Noble also reduced the size of some initial orders while widening the overall selection of titles available, encouraging a greater sense of discovery. Fortune reported this month that the company effectively abandoned the old pay-for-display model and shifted responsibility for assortment decisions much closer to the shop floor.

It is a lesson with relevance far beyond retail. Large organisations frequently assume that the best way to improve performance is to collect more data at headquarters and impose greater consistency. Daunt’s argument was that, in certain businesses, the people closest to customers already possess information that central management cannot easily replicate.

The challenge, of course, is knowing when to centralise and when not to.

Barnes & Noble did not abandon the advantages of being a large company. It retained the purchasing power, logistics, infrastructure and financial backing of a national chain. What changed was the degree to which headquarters attempted to determine the character of every individual shop.

From contraction to expansion

The clearest evidence that the strategy has worked is the company’s return to expansion. Barnes & Noble had spent years closing stores as online competition and falling sales undermined the economics of its traditional large-format locations. Today, it is opening new shops at a pace that would have seemed improbable during the previous decade.

The company opened more than 60 locations in 2025 and has indicated that it expects another large programme of openings during 2026. It now has more than 700 stores, having been below 600 as recently as 2023. Many of the new locations are smaller than the vast book superstores associated with Barnes & Noble’s earlier expansion, reflecting a more disciplined approach to property and local markets.

The turnaround has also benefited from an unexpected cultural shift. Social media, which might have been expected to accelerate the decline of physical bookshops, has instead helped create a new generation of readers. BookTok has become a powerful discovery engine, turning novels into cultural phenomena and encouraging readers to seek out titles in physical stores. Barnes & Noble has been able to benefit from that renewed enthusiasm without trying to compete directly with the digital platforms that created it.

The broader revival of physical bookselling is not simply a Barnes & Noble story. Independent bookshops have also benefited from consumers looking for more personal, community-based experiences. Axios reported in July that bookstores are staging an unlikely comeback even as overall reading habits face pressure, with physical shops increasingly serving as places of discovery and refuge from digital distraction.

That trend should not be exaggerated. Amazon remains an immensely powerful competitor and the economics of bookselling remain challenging. Barnes & Noble is also privately owned and does not disclose the same level of financial information as a public company, making it difficult to measure every aspect of its performance.

But expansion is difficult to fake. Companies do not commit to dozens of new stores simply because management wants a good story.

The mistake that nearly destroyed the business

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Daunt’s turnaround is that it did not depend on a spectacular new technology, a revolutionary product or a dramatic reinvention of the business model.

In many respects, Barnes & Noble was saved by becoming less ambitious about transformation and more serious about execution.

Daunt has repeatedly argued that the fundamental problem was not that people had stopped wanting bookshops. The problem was that Barnes & Noble’s shops had ceased to be particularly good. Better stores required better displays, better stock, knowledgeable employees and more freedom for local teams to exercise judgement. Publishers Weekly reported that Daunt has continued to invest in store upgrades and staff development while maintaining an aggressive opening programme.

That is a deceptively simple diagnosis, but it challenges much of modern corporate thinking. Struggling businesses are often encouraged to become more technologically sophisticated, more centralised and more automated. Those changes can be necessary. Yet they can also become a distraction if management loses sight of the core experience customers are buying.

The same principle can be seen across other sectors of the European economy, where companies facing digital disruption are discovering that technology alone is rarely a strategy. From the transformation of the European retail sector to the pressure facing traditional high street businesses, the question is increasingly whether established companies can use technology without destroying the qualities that differentiated them in the first place.

A lesson for the modern CEO

There is also a leadership lesson in the Barnes & Noble story.

Modern chief executives are often judged by their ability to simplify organisations, centralise decision-making and create systems that can be measured from the top. Daunt has taken a more complicated route. His approach requires trust. Giving local managers more discretion inevitably means accepting variation, mistakes and decisions that headquarters might not have made itself.

But that variation is precisely the point.

A Barnes & Noble store should not be a replica of every other Barnes & Noble store if its customers are fundamentally different. The business can remain centralised where scale genuinely creates an advantage while allowing local knowledge to determine how that scale is presented to customers.

It is an approach that will resonate with executives dealing with the wider consequences of automation and artificial intelligence. As businesses invest heavily in technology, there is a growing risk that efficiency becomes confused with effectiveness. The challenge for leaders will be deciding which decisions genuinely benefit from centralisation and automation — and which still require human judgement.

That debate is already reshaping how companies are using artificial intelligence, particularly as businesses discover that adopting new technology does not automatically create a better customer experience.

The Bigger Picture

Barnes & Noble’s revival is not yet a finished story. Retail remains unforgiving, Amazon remains formidable and consumer habits will continue to evolve. A company that is opening dozens of stores today can still face very different conditions in five years’ time.

But James Daunt has already achieved something that once appeared highly unlikely. He has helped turn a business widely regarded as a casualty of the digital age into one that is expanding again.

The most important lesson may be that Barnes & Noble did not defeat Amazon by trying to become a smaller version of Amazon. It rediscovered what Amazon could not provide: the physical experience of a well-run bookshop, shaped by people who understand books and the communities buying them.

For years, the retail industry assumed the future belonged entirely to speed, convenience and digital efficiency. Barnes & Noble suggests that prediction was incomplete.

Sometimes the best response to technological disruption is not to copy the disruptor.

Sometimes it is to become better at being yourself.