TRENDSsome you’re not,” Preston says. “With
Amazon, they have algorithms.
They’ll only show you the books they
think you want to see, and that’s a
serious problem because we’re be-
coming balkanized in our thinking.
When you go into a bookstore, there’s
no balkanization. All the books are
right there.”
Independent bookstores, which
have thrived in recent years by tailor-
ing their book selection to their local
areas, emphasizing a personalized
approach to curation, as well as add-
ing cafés and wine bars and hosting
readings and book talks, have picked
up some of the slack created by the
closure of Barnes & Noble locations
and the 2011 bankruptcy of its one-
time rival Borders. The American
Booksellers Association now claims
1,887 members, who run 2,524 stores,
up 53 percent from the 1,651 stores
ABA members owned ten years ago,
according to figures compiled in May
of this year.
At Waterstones, Daunt seemed to
d r aw on h is ex per ience a s a n i ndepen-
dent bookseller, shuttering underper-
forming locations and giving store
managers the power to order books
that might not appeal to customers
at other locations. In interviews ear-
lier this summer, Daunt suggested
he may try a similar approach at
Barnes & Noble. “The main thing
is that there isn’t a template; there’s
not some magic ingredient,” he told
the New York Times. “The Birming-
ham, Alabama, bookshop, I imagine,
will be very different from the one in
downtown Boston. They don’t need
to be told how to sell the exact same
things in the exact same way.” (Barnes
& Noble directed press inquiries to
Elliott Management, which did not
respond to multiple requests for
comment.)
But such a strategy can take the chain
only so far, industry experts warn.
Indie booksellers are local entrepre-
neurs who in many cases are choosing
a pleasant working life among books
over a potentially more lucrative career
in another field, notes Mike Shatzkin,
coauthor of The Book Business: What
Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2019). Barnes & Noble,
on the other hand, is a national cor-
poration with more than six hundred
retail locations, most of them large and
built for a mass audience. “That’s not
going to change because they made
the store look sprucier or because they
changed the selection of books some-
what,” Shatzkin says.
Barnes & Noble’s core problem,
Shatzkin says, is that its business
model—drawing customers by hav-
ing more books at better prices
than smaller shops could possibly
manage—has been outmoded by the
e-tailing revolution, which allows
shoppers to carry the world’s larg-
est mall in their hip pocket. “I think
the large store is a dinosaur,” he says.
“It was built for another paradigm. It
was built for, ‘I want to find what I
need and I don’t want to go six places
looking for it,’ which is not something
anyone under thirty relates to.”
Still, authors and publishing houses
a l i ke have good rea son to hope Dau nt
can make a nationwide bookstore
chain work in an online shopping
era. Barnes & Noble is a key player
in the publishing ecosystem, industry
experts say, because it has an efficient
supply chain and sells books in parts
of the country where indies may not
thrive. At the same time, because its
stores are brick-and-mortar, it en-
courages serendipitous purchases that
help publishers break out new authors.
“We all want Barnes & Noble to
continue and to be a thriving book-
seller,” says McIntosh, the CEO
of Penguin Random House in the
United States. “When any location
closes, whether it’s a single store or
a set of stores, you lose a portion of
sales. There’s no way to say exactly
how many sales are lost, so our goal
is to ensure there is a diversity of re-
tail options and physical locations
where a consumer could choose to
go.” –MICHAEL BOURNESEPT OCT 2019 20Continued from page 18