Barnes & Noble's Comeback, Built One Store at a Time

Not long ago, the only interesting question about Barnes & Noble was how long it had left. Local news stations were filing the obituaries: the Prudential Center location, gone. Omaha, gone. A decade of closures, no new openings, and a costly failed bet on the Nook e-reader — which, according to reporting by Good e-Reader, cost the company over a billion dollars as it tried and failed to take on Amazon's Kindle. The chain was retail's favorite cautionary tale, right up there with Sears and Blockbuster.

That's not the story anymore.

As of mid-2026, Barnes & Noble operates 717 locations — 90 more than it had in 2019. It has opened 20 new stores this year alone, with more planned. The turnaround is real enough that IPO speculation has started circulating. To understand how it happened, you have to understand the man Elliott Advisors brought in to run the thing: James Daunt.

The Guy Who's Done This Before

Daunt's biography is almost too convenient for the narrative. He started as an investment banker in New York in the 1980s, left finance to open Daunt Books in London in 1990, and built it into a beloved 10-store independent chain before eventually taking the helm at Waterstones — the UK equivalent of Barnes & Noble — and quietly rescuing it from its own period of decline. When Elliott acquired Barnes & Noble, they handed him a much larger version of the same problem.

His diagnosis, speaking to Fortune's Phil Wahba, is disarmingly simple: "I simply wanted to make these stores really good again, and one sets on a series of very slow and incremental processes to do that."

That framing — slow, incremental — is worth sitting with. Most retail turnarounds are pitched on the speed of the pivot. Daunt's pitch is almost the opposite: patient craft applied at scale. Whether that's a genuine operating philosophy or good positioning ahead of an IPO is a question worth keeping open.

What "Hyper-Local" Actually Means Here

The core strategic move Daunt made was dismantling the old Barnes & Noble's command-and-control inventory model. Under the previous regime, the company operated like a big-box chain in the mold of Target or Walmart: the home office dictated exactly which books went where, on which tables, on which dates, attached to commercial arrangements with publishers who paid for prominent placement. A store manager's job, in that world, was closer to logistics than curation.

A former bookseller described the experience in the Fortune piece: "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."

Daunt killed that model. Each store now curates its own assortment, controls its own visual merchandising — including handwritten staff recommendations — and runs its own social media accounts. The pay-for-display system, in which publishers effectively bought shelf prominence, is gone. What replaced it is something closer to how a good independent bookstore operates: booksellers making editorial judgments about what their specific community actually wants to read.

The Union Square store in Manhattan is the most visible example. Walk through it and the inventory reads like someone has been paying attention to New York specifically — conversation-starter titles about economics and politics, local-interest sections, cookbooks, gift books. The tables are smaller and designed to slow you down, to make you pick things up. It's a different spatial logic than the old model, which was built around moving volume.

Whether this translates consistently across 717 locations is a separate question from whether it works in one flagship store. Daunt's argument is that the decentralization itself is the scalable part — you train and promote against the question of "how do you curate well," not "what do you put on table four." That's a meaningful distinction, but it also means the quality of execution varies by store, by manager, by market.

The Market Logic Daunt Is Betting On

Here's where the business case gets genuinely interesting, and where it's worth scrutinizing Daunt's framing rather than just accepting it.

His growth thesis rests on a claim about the book market that isn't standard retail logic. Most retail categories are zero-sum, or close to it: if you sell more, someone else sells less. Daunt argues books are different.

"The book market is not a finite one," he told Fortune. "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 three. 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."

This isn't a new claim — booksellers have made some version of it for decades — but it's also not simply wrong. There's reasonable evidence that physical bookstores generate discovery-driven purchases that wouldn't otherwise happen online, where you search for what you already want. The experience of browsing is functionally different from the experience of searching, and browsing tends to produce more transactions.

What Daunt is really arguing is that Barnes & Noble's competitive set isn't just Amazon; it's also the couch, the TV, the phone. The enemy is inattention, not a rival retailer. If a better Barnes & Noble puts books in front of people who weren't already shopping for books, that's genuinely additive. Amazon's own documented dominance — by 2020, it had captured over half of all US print book sales and 80% of the ebook market, per data compiled by PassiveSecrets.com — suggests the ceiling on that theory hasn't been tested yet.

But here's the tension worth naming: Daunt's non-zero-sum framing is also convenient self-presentation. A chain of 717 stores competing for shelf space, foot traffic, and consumer attention is absolutely in competition with independent bookstores for some portion of its business. The independent bookstore sector has seen meaningful growth in recent years, and that growth exists in the same ecosystem Barnes & Noble is expanding into. The interests aren't perfectly aligned, whatever the "rising tide" rhetoric suggests.

The IPO Question and What It Reveals

The most pointed moment in the Fortune interview comes when Wahba asks about the IPO speculation and how public markets might change the way the company is run. Daunt's answer is telling: "What goes on in New York, any which way, doesn't make much difference. What matters to us is what's going on at the local level."

That's a clean deflection. It's also, if you read it charitably, a coherent statement of strategy: the whole model is built on local execution, so the identity of the capital structure in theory shouldn't change what happens in the stores.

But public markets do change things. Quarterly earnings pressure changes the calculus on "slow and incremental." Analyst coverage changes how management communicates about the business. And a company that has positioned its turnaround around the absence of commercial publisher arrangements has to explain, clearly, how it generates the revenue that used to come from those arrangements. Those are real tensions, not hypotheticals.

Elliott Advisors is a private equity firm, and private equity firms eventually exit. An IPO is one path. A sale is another. Neither is inherently bad for the business, but both involve a reckoning with the question of what Barnes & Noble is actually worth, and to whom.

What the Numbers Say — and Don't Say

The store count is the clearest evidence that something is working. Going from a decade of closures to 90 net new locations since 2019 isn't a marketing story; it's a real estate and operations story. Landlords don't give leases to companies they think are dying.

Romance, Daunt notes, has been a standout category — escapism selling well in a period when people apparently need it. That tracks with broader patterns in consumer behavior. The physical bookstore, at its best, offers something the algorithm doesn't: serendipity with editorial judgment behind it.

The question the Fortune piece circles without quite landing on is whether Daunt's model is durable or whether it's a well-executed correction that has a ceiling. Making bad stores good again is a finite project. After that, the work is keeping good stores good, growing into new markets without diluting the curation quality, and navigating a capital structure that may eventually answer to shareholders who didn't sign up for slow and incremental.

For now, the stores are open, the shelves are curated, and someone in New York is apparently buying a book called Shop Cats. That's not nothing.

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Jin Seo covers business, finance, and economic policy for BuzzRAG.