Bookstores: Barnes & Noble’s new-style store in Concord
New take on classic bookstore opens in Concord
Barnes & Noble is introducing a new type of store, opening a location in Concord this week amid competition from Amazon and a resurgence of independent bookstores.
On Tuesday, Bay Area writer Carole Price held a reading of her novel “Twisted Vine” to mark the store’s opening, treating shoppers to a tale of a Northern California vineyard inheritance saga mixed with murder. More than anything, people are happy to have a new bookstore, said store manager Paolo Theissen. “Some of them actually clapped when they walked in this morning,” she said.
Concord has another chain bookstore, Half Price Books. Amazon Books is in neighboring Walnut Creek; it has another store in San Jose. Barnes & Noble has 627 stores in the U.S., but only 10 in the Bay Area. It closed its last San Francisco location, a store in Fisherman’s Wharf, in 2010.
Barnes & Noble sees the new store as a modern take on its classic bookstore.
“It features a smaller, more flexible design that puts books center stage,” Frank Morabito, vice president of stores at Barnes & Noble, said in an email.
The first such store opened in Folsom (Sacramento County) two years ago; the Concord store is the 13th with the new design. At 12,200 square feet, it’s half the size of a traditional Barnes & Noble store.
Though each location differs slightly, there are some common elements. At the Concord store, shorter bookshelves line up uniformly across the floor, allowing for a panoramic view. Light falls prominently on books displayed on shelves, and on a round table — what store workers call the “book theater” — where piles of books sit atop each other near the front of the store.
Workers carry tablets to help customers with questions. A cafe sells coffee and baked goods. Events, like the book reading held on opening day and a kids’ painting session this weekend, will be frequent.
The store’s design puts it somewhere between Amazon Books’ tech-heavy experience and independent bookstores that see themselves as neighborhood cultural centers.
“These (Barnes & Noble) stores are more focused,” said Calvin Crosby, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. “It functions quite similarly as a good independent store which has been a bastion for arts and culture.”
Barnes & Noble is smart to notice the trend, Crosby said. “Bookstores are the heart of the community, and people like to visit in person.” He added that he is happy about the Barnes & Noble opening, despite the historic friction between independent bookstores he represents and chain booksellers.
The New York bookstore chain once primarily contended with Borders. The two upended the publishing industry with big, stand-alone stores. Then Amazon came along and changed bookselling again. Dealt a blow by the 2007-09 recession, Borders closed in 2011. Barnes & Noble survived after closing hundreds of stores.
Independent bookstores have made a comeback, according to the American Booksellers Association, an industry trade group. The number of independent bookstores across the country increased 50% between 2009 and 2019, from 1,651 to 2,470.
Barnes & Noble still faces financial woes. Under pressure from activist investors, the company said in October that it would consider seeking a buyer after getting interest from several parties, including Leonard Riggio, the company’s executive chairman and top shareholder.