This long New Yorker profile of Barnes & Noble CEO and longtime bookstore tycoon James Daunt was fascinating if you’re a bookish nerd like me. I wrote about Daunt before in the context of B&N’s positive turnaround, but this piece was more about its place in the ongoing discourse about the supposed “decline of reading”. Here are some bits I found especially noteworthy.
Shoutout to Bill Nighy, a real one:
Daunt Books grew for years as a quiet shop with a devoted following. “You felt the people who worked there were believers,” the actor Bill Nighy, a regular since the nineties, said. (He continues to give people its book-subscription service at Christmas. “If anyone knew how much time and money I spend in bookshops, they would say, ‘What the fuck?’” he said. “It is made more delicious by the fact that books were dead, officially, about ten years ago.”)
Why bookstores are a fundamentally different business from Amazon:
The idea that consumer companies are in the stuff business is still Amazon’s longest shadow. Enterprises plowing the creative fields now call their products “content.” If goods are interchangeable—if it’s all just stuff—then market success must be the result of efficiencies in the delivery systems, and we are wise to focus on those, not the qualities of individual works.
By 2011, Daunt had developed a different philosophy. He had spent two decades on the shop floor, studying what customers bought and didn’t buy and why. Books, he knew, were not like laundry detergent. Decisions rarely happened categorically or in bulk; everything came down to whether the specific thing in front of you—that book, this shop—was good enough to draw you in. If powerful growth was to be had in the book business, that specificity would have to remain central.
Why e-readers didn’t overtake print and why AI is the new Kindle:
When Daunt arrived at Waterstones, bookselling was in a panic about the Kindle, said to be poised to replace paper books. Daunt was doubtful: he’d used the product. And he’d seen the advent of the personal computer during his time as a banker, when the arrival of the I.B.M. XT had carried him and his peers up the ranks. But books were more like rubber bands or bottle openers than like computers: their form was largely unimprovable for their function. Daunt had the Kindles displayed in every Waterstones. They sold quickly at first, then slowly, and then, booksellers told me, Kindle buyers began returning for books. Today, the e-reader market has plateaued at some ten per cent of traditional publishers’ revenue, while about seventy-five per cent comes from paper books, a technology essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century.
Now we are having a Kindle moment with A.I., which has seemingly started to affect the sales of self-help and pop-business titles—the kinds of books, Joel Miller pointed out to me, that present themselves as answers to such prompts as “How do I” or “I want to.” But the claim that A.I. writing threatens to replace novels, archival histories, reported narrative, and so on, seems a naïve insult to readers, and major publishers have avoided A.I. work. As far as the shelves of the bookstore are concerned, A.I. writing is a technology without a market.
Love this natural blending of old and new:
As Daunt waited, he checked the pyramids. Early on at Daunt Books, he and Wolstencroft found that, if they placed unknown début-fiction titles on their own, people shied away, but, if they interposed known books of a similar flavor, customers bought both. Presenting the new in the context of the old allowed readers to orient themselves.
Reading as a social activity:
For most of us, ideas about the state of literature are the result of a cohort experience. Reading is private—or has been since at least the sixth century, before which the Western habit was to read everything aloud. But conversing about reading is a social activity. If you were of a certain cohort in a certain time, you might remember everybody talking about “Primary Colors,” or “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” or “White Teeth.” To be ensconced within a reading cohort is bliss, and falling off the cart can be demoralizing. “Within the industry, we’re very used to there being a golden age and it being just over,” one publisher told me dryly. “The moment of decline usually depends on the age of the person telling the story.”
Reading as traveling:
Travelling, like reading, is a reminder of the impossibility of communicating across territories—but also evidence that, somehow, we always do.
On free speech and censorship:
The politics of bookselling, as Daunt sees them, are pragmatic and pluralist. “I think booksellers, as a tribe, almost universally believe in principles of liberalism, which means that we’re politically of the left—not in a punching-with-Bernie way, though plenty will be, but in a commitment to diverse societies,” he said. Under his aegis, Barnes & Noble has joined with publishers to wage legal battles against content restrictions in Texas and Virginia, like those used to limit the distribution of L.G.B.T.Q.-themed books. But it has also supported its shop in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which mounted a display of maga books: the local taste. “We can’t believe in free speech and the importance of resisting censorship and then censor ourselves,” Daunt said.
