Independents have survived “only by reaching out more effectively to their core readers in their geographic community,” Holter says. It’s also true that Daunt’s key strategic move of giving store managers the latitude to make inventory decisions themselves rather than binding them to central ordering out of New York parallels the approach of independent bookstores nationwide. (That process was slower in California than elsewhere in the country, Daunt says, because seismic codes requiring bookshelves and display cases to be bolted to the floor made them harder to remove and reposition.) ![]() Indeed, Daunt acknowledged in a 2021 interview with Publishers Weekly that industry trends had been working in the company’s favor: Book sales were holding firm, rents were down and pandemic closures gave Barnes & Noble the opportunity to redesign and refurbish its stores while customers were stuck at home. But if the publishing industry were doing poorly, Barnes & Noble would not be having a comeback.” “Everyone in the industry agrees that James Daunt is doing the right thing. “Normally, the business is happy when sales are flat,” says Jane Friedman, a veteran consultant and commentator on publishing and writing. Publishers and authors rightly fear that they’ll lose out financially from the digitization of books but it’s also quite possible that, properly managed, the technological revolution will make them more money. The sales surge faded somewhat in 2022 but still ran ahead of 2020.īusiness Column: Here’s why you can’t ‘own’ your ebooks Sales of trade books - that is, consumer fiction and nonfiction - rose more than 40%. As COVID restrictions ebbed in 2021, sales in bricks-and-mortar stores rose 23.9% industrywide, to $6.22 billion. The 825.7 million print books sold in 2021 were the highest total ever recorded by the sales-tracking service NPD BookScan since its launch in 2004 and a 9% increase over 2020.īook publishing revenues rose 12.3% to a record $29.33 billion in the same period, according to the Assn. ![]() In part it reflects a record surge in book sales since the start of the pandemic. The apparent turnaround at Barnes & Noble isn’t entirely the product of Daunt’s strategy. “Our view of Barnes & Noble as a threat is different from what it was,” says Darryl Holter, co-owner of Chevalier’s Books in the Larchmont Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, “because I see them in some sense as a counterweight to Amazon - a counterweight that we can’t be because we don’t have that sort of volume.” One result of the change in management is that the book industry no longer fears that Barnes & Noble will follow Borders, which went out of business in 2011, into the void - an event that would have removed miles of retail bookshelves from the market and put a serious dent in book sales.Įven some independent booksellers - a community that once saw Barnes & Noble as an evil empire - are almost relieved at its likely survival, largely because there is a greater villain in the field: Amazon. Many of the new locations, however, will be smaller than the megastores that were typical of the Barnes & Noble footprint of yore. If the openings proceed as planned, the chain will have slightly more stores than the 627 it operated in January 2019, before its acquisition. ![]() The chain is expecting to open about 30 stores this year, adding to the 22 it has opened in its last fiscal year. How well Barnes & Noble is doing today is a bit of a mystery because as a private company it doesn’t release profit-and-loss figures, but its publicly announced expansion plans provide a good indication. The cherished works from 1927 losing their copyright protection include the film ‘Metropolis,’ a classic Laurel and Hardy short and the first Hardy Boys book. Business Column: These historic works are coming free from copyright.
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