While many fear that bookshops are under dire threat, British bookseller James Daunt - CEO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones , maintains precisely the opposite. Reading and book buying, he insists, are far from dying.
Global Geneva editor Edward Girardet in Geneva and America's editor William Dowell in Atlanta spoke with Daunt as part of the magazine's new podcast, "Zanzibar Café – Where Maps End and Journeys Begin."
For a man who has succeeded in turning around the bookshop industry in both the United Kingdom and the United States, James Daunt hardly comes across as an aggressive salesman. A former banker in his 60s who read history at Cambridge, he projects instead the air of a congenial literary aficionado, someone who would far rather chat about books amidst the shelves of his original Marylebone shop than engage in any kind of hard sell.
"I started selling books in prehistoric times when dinosaurs roamed the Earth," he says with quiet amusement.
It was a complicated moment to enter the trade. The big chains - Waterstones and Dylans in the UK, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-A-Million in the United States - were expanding massively. "It was perhaps not an auspicious moment for the smaller, independent bookshops," Daunt acknowledges, but rather a "golden era" for chain bookselling. Meanwhile, the independents were already under economic strain from the recession brought on by the first Gulf War, a situation that, he reflects, may resonate with the uncertainties rippling through today's Middle East.
Despite the overwhelming competition, Daunt believed then - as he believes now - that excellence is the only reliable strategy. "If a small bookseller believed in excellence, one would be all right. If not, one would clearly be in big trouble. That remains true to this day. If you run a very good bookshop, you will probably be fine…bookshops will continue to be truly appreciated within their communities."
Waterstones in Wakefield, UK.
What followed was an improbable ascent. Daunt emerged as "the man who saved Waterstones" before turning his attention across the Atlantic, transforming Barnes & Noble into the world's largest brick-and-mortar retail bookseller. Today, there are over 700 Barnes & Noble outlets and an additional 120 Paper Source shops across the United States. Waterstones is the centrepiece of an expanding group of some 300 bookshops across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Belgium, encompassing well-known names such as Blackwell's, Foyles and Hatchards. Daunt continues to own Daunt Books independently, with nine traditional locations in London.
Far from consolidating, Daunt keeps opening new stores. In 2025 alone, he opened 58 new American locations plus nine Books Inc. stores in the San Francisco Bay Area - 67 in total. As of early March 2026, seven more had already opened, with a target of 60 new stores for the year. (See local TV news story in Chicago on new B & N stores opening in 2026)
The diagnosis of what went wrong with the chains in the first place is delivered with precision. "They failed because they stopped running good bookshops," Daunt says. "They lost confidence in the face of Amazon…and the allure of online buying. They stopped investing in their physical bookshops, and above all, they stopped investing in their booksellers." As Amazon grew stronger, he continues, there was a "collective breakdown." Chains reached for financial levers - cost-cutting, shedding their most experienced and therefore most expensive staff - rather than doubling down on what bookshops do best. "This failed to resolve their quandaries and led them into a downward spiral."
What then prompted Daunt, in 2011, to take over a chain he regarded with no particular fondness? "Effectively, Waterstones was bankrupt," he says plainly. But he had come to understand that its loss would be felt far beyond London's leafier, high-end postcodes. A large chain operating in less affluent communities, he realised, serves people who have no obvious alternative. "For someone as a small bookseller with absolutely no respect for Waterstones, I came to realise that this would be a tragedy," he says with a laugh.
Amazon online sales...a global threat to bookshops?
Amazon
So what does a physical shop offer that a click on Amazon cannot? Daunt is eloquent on this point. Yes, he admits, you can get a book delivered neatly packaged to your door.
But "there is no serendipity that you get from shopping in a bookshop which is a very very special community and social space. Discovering a book in a book shop is a completely different experience than going online. It's a wonderful thing for many people at different stages of their lives.
Children, for example, do not browse Amazon to choose their books. In short, a book bought from a bookshop is a much better book even if it is exactly the same book that you can get online."
That serendipity is not accidental. It is the product of carefully assembled teams. "There are some shops whose success is based on an exceptional manager, but most are based on an exceptional team," Daunt explains.
A good bookshop needs people who can unpack cartons efficiently, people who excel at customer service, and people with an eye for display - those who know how to make a shop "pretty," as he puts it. "The people in our children's section, for example, will be different from those in our history section. We're looking for an assembly of knowledge and skills to create a proper team with a sense of harmony to serve creatively all the diverse people who come into our bookstores."
Bookshops are increasingly attracting new readers
The size of a store shapes its social role in ways that surprised even Daunt. The large chain bookshop, he argues, is paradoxically more inclusive than the small independent. "This is particularly important because it means that everyone can come into our shops. No one feels intimidated as you would coming into a small shop. Fifteen kids can't pour into a small independent after school to lark around…They can with a large chain seller, and they do. We're very vibrant in that sort of respect."
Events, too, must be tailored to individual locations. "In a place like Wichita, you're not going to attract famous authors so you have to put on something different. The bookseller can do readings for kids, for example. Above all, we should be a social space," Daunt notes.
Global Geneva's YouthWrites programme designed to encourage reading - and writing
Global Geneva
When asked whether the United States, unlike India or China, where book reading and buying among the middle class is exploding, suffers from book "deserts" analogous to the news deserts that have hollowed out rural American journalism, Daunt pushes back. Most communities, he argues, are aspirational, particularly for their children. Books are central to that aspiration.
"Yet we're opening book shops in largely blue-collar places, such as Visalia, a deeply agricultural area in eastern California, where you will find up to 400 people queued up for your opening. We're running an extremely successful store there now."
Daunt is equally direct about the cultural assumptions that underpin concern over book deserts. "There is a great propensity for metropolitan snobbery which is quite unjustified." In the UK, Waterstones has maintained a presence in less affluent areas long after other retailers withdrew - and those stores remain successful.
The explosion of self-publishing does not trouble Daunt. Most self-published titles circulate in digital format and rarely intersect with the physical bookshop. More fundamentally, he sees curation as the bookshop's defining service. "Book shops have always been about curation. You must decide what you're carrying and what you are not carrying. We do not carry most books which are published, and this is one of the great services we provide readers. We only curate those we consider worth reading…this makes us much more interesting."
That curation is deliberately decentralised. Each Waterstones and each Barnes & Noble makes its own choices; no two stores are identical. "You are curating to your community," Daunt says simply. "This makes perfect sense."
And what of the culture wars around banned books, particularly in Texas and Florida? Daunt is almost breezy. "Virtually every one of their book shops across the United States has a table with banned books, which often proves an attraction. These include some of the great works of our time and people are obviously interested." So far, there have been no serious legal confrontations although booksellers and publishers remain vigilant about their right to sell freely.
Libraries, Daunt argues, remain crucial to cultivating readers but have been badly let down by politicians. "I grew up in a time when we read three borrowing books on a weekly visit to the public library," he recalls. "This was obviously before growing affluence enabled people to buy more books." Today both public and school libraries are "hugely important in nurturing reading."
Yet particularly in the United Kingdom, successive governments have failed to fund them adequately. "This is one of the idiotic things perpetrated by our political lords and masters over the past few decades. The conservative right-wing government was largely responsible for this, but the current Labour government is doing little to redress this. In the United States, at least until recently, libraries are much better funded."
Young adult books displayed at Barnes & Noble.
B & N
Perhaps the most striking aspect of talking with Daunt is his robust refusal to lament the reading habits of the young. In an age of mobile phones consuming four, five, even eight hours of some young people's days, the received wisdom holds that literature is losing. Daunt has heard it all before.
"In my 36 years of book selling, publishers have been lamenting the death of literature, the death of fiction, the death of non-fiction, and yet every year, book sales have gone up and continue to go up…My parents lamented the same, that I was destined for a life of ignorance and that I had square eyes because I kept watching Blue Peter. I spent half an hour every day watching it."
The data in his stores bears him out. "We've been peddling this nonsense for the entirety of my life, but people continue to read depending on their stage in life…and it has been increasing all of my professional life, and no matter what part of the community. If you come into our shops, they are crammed with what we call Young Adults' books and they are full, full, full. That is where the energy of the shop lies - and the commercial dollars and pounds. Whenever a new book comes out, there is a queue around the block. Yes, of course, the attention flips around. One moment it is romance, another Rebecca Yarros…But we also see massive sales with the classics such as Jane Austen and George Eliot. They're reading classics and yet we still wring our hands and say that no one is reading."
Daunt is equally insistent that complacency has no place. "We should never relent in our campaigns to get people to read…this is not a downwards trajectory."
Why does Daunt consider books and reading so powerful? The answer goes beyond commerce. "The physical book is such a wonderful and enduring product. Good books inform and inspire you. Your imagination is being taken to places, where, yes, movies, plays and other forms of culture can take you, yet books are transportable. You can read it at night, on the train…wherever you like, and it will take you into a different place…whether you are a one-year-old in your buggy with one of those detachable things…or whether you are the oldest of old citizens. It will still inspire you."
Books, he adds, mark more than time. They mark relationships. They are part of courtship. "The physical book is now supported by digital and audio books, but the physical book is supreme amongst these parts of one's imagination and understanding."
And how does one catch a browser's eye in the first place? "Like most people, I judge books by their cover. If it's nice to hold, I may read it. But if it is light and unattractive, I may put it down." Booksellers, he notes, are also inveterate recommenders to one another. "They like to read and discuss and debate around books." Personally, he gravitates toward non-fiction: the pleasure of educating himself remains central to who he is.
The interview closes with publishing itself. Is it harder today for a new author to break through? Daunt contradicts the framing. "I would contest the premise of larger publishers only becoming larger. They invest in new writers as do agents. The narrative of authors not being supported means that not all can succeed. A lot can be a function of luck and serendipity. I don't think it is a lack of investment." He cites a debut novel, The Golden Boy, by a Canadian author as an example of genuinely exciting new writing about to reach his shelves.
And how does a bookseller decide what deserves to be there? With characteristic candour, he notes: "We spend our lives reading new books and are really quite brutal about what is good and what is not. We are, I am afraid, the person who tells the parent that their baby is ugly. It is a subjective opinion. We as booksellers make the same judgements as judges. Do we always get it right? Of course not. Are we subjective? Yes. It is up to each shop, but booksellers talk to each other the whole time. Discovery flares through our world. Books do shoot up quickly through social media and traditional reviews. All that is very positive. It is not a single moment. It happens nationally and within local communities. We are constantly responding to our readers."
On cafés and their role as “cultural centres” prompted by the notably packed Barnes & Noble stores observed over Christmas in Texas, California and Oregon, Daunt is measured rather than evangelical. "You only add a café when you have all the space you need for books. It all translates into square footage. You get to about 15,000 square feet; you can start thinking about a café. But if you do, you will have less range as a bookshop, such as Waterstones which is run as an authoritative bookstore."
What, finally, keeps this relentlessly positive man up at night? He pauses, then smiles. Perhaps, he concedes, a little too much wine, which he loves. "I am very positive about physical book selling. Books have an enduring appeal and importance. Both we and the independents realise that if you create a good book shop, you will always have an audience. There is a constant recycling of other retailers. And we need to invest in the careers of our booksellers."
It is not the answer of a man who fears the future. It is the answer of someone who has already helped to shape it.
Global book market value (2024): approximately USD 150 billion
Projected value by 2033: over USD 215 billion
US print book sales (2024): 782 million units — up 23% over the past decade
Physical books' share of global sales: 78–84%
Amazon controls roughly 50% of the Anglo-Saxon book market
Large chains (Barnes & Noble, Waterstones) account for approximately 20–25%
Independent booksellers: 5–6%
Supermarkets: the remainder
Physical bookstores projected market worth by 2029: USD 27.25 billion
Online book sales projected to nearly double by 2034
2024 Book Fiction Growth (GfK/NielsenIQ, released London Book Fair 2025)
16 of 18 territories showed significant fiction revenue growth
India: +30.7% | Mexico: +20.7% | Brazil: +16.4% | Spain: +12.0%
France: Books classified by law as an "essential good." The Lang Law (1981) fixes book prices; booksellers cannot discount more than 5%. Result: the densest network of independent bookshops in the developed world. Amazon's reach is far more limited than in the UK or US. The government's Pass Culture voucher for 18-year-olds boosted teen book purchases by approximately 15%.
Germany: Fixed book prices have been law since 2002: the same title costs the same in a small-town shop as on Amazon.de. The third-largest book market globally. The national booksellers' association reported 2.8% turnover growth in 2023.
India: The world's fastest-growing major book market, with fiction revenues up 30.7% in 2024 and a total market expected to reach USD 10 billion. Enormous linguistic diversity; regional-language titles often outsell English ones.
China: The second-largest book market globally, publishing approximately 1.35 million new titles annually. Growth driven by urbanisation and an expanding middle class.
Japan: Manga accounts for over 30% of the entire national publishing market. Japanese fiction has surged internationally: in the UK in 2024, 43% of the top 40 translated titles were Japanese.
United Kingdom: Abandoned fixed book price protection in 1995. Exports more books than any other country (over 50% of industry turnover). Waterstones' revival under Daunt is the defining story of British bookselling this decade.
United States: Leads global book revenue at approximately USD 24.77 billion in 2025. No fixed pricing; free market prevails. Independent bookshops are staging a quiet comeback alongside Barnes & Noble's well-documented turnaround.
#BookTok videos: over 35 million globally (mid-2024)
Total views: over 200 billion
Average sales increase for a book trending on BookTok: 500%
Young adults (16–25) who say BookTok led them to discover reading: 59%
Youth who say they read a book they would otherwise never have picked up: 68%
Edward Girardet is a Geneva-based foreign correspondent and author. He has reported conflict, humanitarian and environmental issues worldwide for more than 40 years.
Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.
