If you’ve spent any length of time on the internet over the past several months, you’ve probably encountered the idea that we’re now living in a post-literate age.
Americans, as a whole, are reading for pleasure less than they did a decade or two ago.
One 2026 study found that 36% of Americans are reading fewer books now than they did 10 years ago, and another 24% say they don’t read any books at all, CBS News reported.
While those statistics are alarming on many levels, among booksellers, they’ve caused real concern about the future of the industry. In fact, there are about half as many bookstores now as there were in 1998, according to recent data from the Census Bureau.
Yet one major bookseller is moving in the opposite direction, opening new locations and staging a remarkable comeback: Barnes & Noble.
Barnes & Noble’s comeback is accelerating
In 2019, after years of declining sales and store closures, Barnes & Noble was acquired by investment firm Elliott Management. The company brought in James Daunt, the bookseller credited with reviving British chain Waterstones, to lead its turnaround.
At the time, many American readers worried that the sale marked the beginning of the end for the bookstore.
However, the opposite has proven to be true. Daunt has not only revived the chain, but has accelerated its growth and rebuilt its reputation.
Case in point: On Nov. 4, Barnes & Noble opened five new locations in California, Maryland, New York, Texas, and Virginia, with another 10 planned for the remainder of the month.
These openings put Barnes & Noble on track to open 60 stores by the end of the year.
That’s a significant number for any brick-and-mortar retailer, but it’s especially major for the bookseller who had fewer than 600 locations as recently as 2023.
And it’s not just Barnes & Noble’s new locations that are thriving. In September, the chain noted that many of its stores, including five in Orlando, had hit record sales levels.
“The revival is there,” CEO James Daunt told Axios in July about the chain’s renaissance.
Barnes & Noble is taking a different approach to retail
One of the major contributing factors in Barnes & Noble’s revival is its efforts to personalize and localize its stores.
While the chain is national, not every location sells the same catalog of books and array of non-book merchandise. That’s because when Daunt took over as CEO in 2019, he empowered managers to stock shelves with what their specific communities liked to read.
“If you let the bookstore teams themselves get on and do sensible things — common sense things — within their stores, most of them begin to run much better stores, and that becomes an increasingly virtuous upward cycle of improvement,” he told Axios.
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One particularly notable example of how well this approach works was the runaway success of the 2025 novel “The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans.
When booksellers in certain markets brought customers’ increased demand for the book to corporate, the C-suite secured additional copies for those specific areas, helping solidify it as one of the chain’s best-sellers for the year.
“Having that constant flow of information and communication is critical to how we’re set up in the way we run business now,” Barnes & Noble Senior Director of Books Shannon DeVito told Retail Brew. “Because they can’t know everything about everything, and we can’t know what’s going on in those individual stores.”
GlobalData analyst Neil Saunders told Axios that this sort of community-focused approach is what sets chains apart in today’s crowded retail landscape.
“There can be little doubt that Barnes & Noble has been revived and that most of its recent success comes down to the approach of James Daunt,” he said.
“That has meant taking random products out of stores, focusing on making the shops places where people want to linger, and thinking carefully about what customers want. Shops succeed when people running them understand their customers.”
Consumers are rediscovering the physical bookstore
Barnes & Noble may be the largest national bookstore chain bucking the post-literate age closure trend, but it’s not alone in its success.
Independent bookstores across the country are also seeing an uptick in openings and revenues.
The number of bookstore companies in the U.S. grew by 70% between 2021 and 2025, from 2,010 to 3,416, according to the American Booksellers Association. Additionally, 73% of booksellers recorded sales increases in 2025 as compared to the previous year.
One explanation for this is consumers’ growing desire for nostalgic and analog experiences.
“It’s going back to the past where the technology was simpler and there’s also a feeling of nostalgia that is involved in the popularity of bookstores,” Peggy Stover, a University of Iowa business marketing professor, told Axios. “People use them as a gathering place to go have a cup of coffee, do it as a meetup, and I think [younger generations are] looking at that habit again and bringing it back.”
That desire for more in-person experiences has implications beyond bookselling.
As consumers spend more of their time shopping, working, and entertaining themselves online, physical retailers have an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering something that can’t be replicated on a screen: a place to browse, socialize, and discover something new.
So Barnes & Noble’s comeback offers an interesting lesson for the broader retail industry.
In an increasingly digital shopping environment, treating consumers as a singular entity and offering an assortment of products it’s assumed they want may not be enough. Giving them a reason to visit, explore, and spend time in a more tailored, community-oriented store could be just as important.
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