Daunt’s diagnosis of the industry is refreshingly simple: Good bookstores thrive, bad bookstores die. He waves away the belief that online shopping and e-readers have been unstoppable harbingers of demise. “My view was that the reason bookstores had failed to defend themselves against Amazon is simply they weren’t good enough,” he told me, “and the only reason they would fail to defend themselves against Kindle is they wouldn’t be good enough.”
Daunt was the founder of Daunt Books in Britain. He took over the failing Waterstones chain in 2011 and is credited with saving it. Now he’s in charge of Barnes & Noble, too, and whatever he’s doing seems to be working. Why?
Daunt’s focus has been devolving power to local store managers. A great bookstore, he thinks, is a reflection of the community in which it exists. A Barnes & Noble next to a thriving church needs to be different than one down the street from a high school. He has been unwinding the deals the company made that let publishers pay for placement, deals that have prevented local stores from choosing what to display or stock.
“We sort of take three steps forward and then one step back,” Daunt told me. “The forward is my constantly encouraging and pushing for the stores themselves to have the complete freedom to do absolutely whatever they want — how they display their books, price their books, sort their sections, anything. Those freedoms are difficult if you lived in a very straitjacketed world where everything was dictated to you.”
Daunt, as a onetime indie bookstore owner, believes that there’s something ineffable about a great bookstore. And he is dismissive of the kind of customer research that would cast that art as a science. I asked him, for instance, whether Barnes & Noble tracked the demographics of its customers. “My predecessors spent enormous amounts of energy and effort to answer questions of that sort, and I spend literally zero,” he said. “I have no interest at all in even beginning to think of that as a question. It’s totally irrelevant. Our stores are for everybody.”
Daunt’s view on e-book readers — of which Barnes & Noble has its own, the Nook — is that they aren’t quite the competition they’re made out to be. He recalls running Waterstones during the rise of the Kindle and agreeing to stock Kindles in-store. This seemed, to his critics, like selling the rope that would be used to hang him. He saw it differently.
“You e-read solely for convenience,” he said. “But the physical book is just a huge repository of pleasure. It’s hugely enjoyable to select a book in a nice bookstore that respects books. That’s just a real rush if it’s done nicely. As far as I was concerned, the e-reader would have people reading more, and the more people read, the more physical books they’d end up buying.”