A renewed focus on books at Barnes & Noble stores
Just over a year ago I had a dispiriting experience in my local Barnes & Noble when I walked into the store and found the most prominent display featuring wool socks and scarves.
I live in Charleston, South Carolina. Also, Barnes & Noble is a bookstore, not a clothing store or knickknack store or record store, all things that were displayed with more prominence than books.
Lots of stuff has happened for Barnes & Noble since then, most notably a sale that put in charge James Daunt, the man who turned around the U.K.’s Waterstone’s chain.
I made my first visit to my local Dauntera Barnes & Noble recently, and let me say, it looks like a bookstore again.
This is a good thing. Regular readers know that I am ride-or-die with local, independent stores, but I also believe that a healthy literary ecosystem requires a thriving Barnes & Noble as a check against the hegemony of Amazon. It is like the old stop-motion dinosaur animation videos of my youth, where a triceratops would occasionally take on a T-Rex. The triceratops probably isn’t going to come out the victor, but it can deal enough damage to make the T-Rex think twice before it goes on an indiscriminate slaughtering spree.
As I entered the store, on the front left where the socks used to be was a big, twosided display with books face-out, organized by genre/category. The display was festive, inviting and the dust jackets immediately had me thinking about who I might give the titles to as gifts.
Themed tables beyond the obvious were sprinkled throughout the store, including one for new music biographies/memoirs that had me picking up both Liz Phair (“Horror Stories”) and Ben Folds’ (“A Dream About Lightning Bugs: A Life of Music and Cheap Lessons”). Rather than tooling through with nothing catching my eye, I lingered, picking up and sampling different possibilities, weighing how many books I could reasonably take home.
The help desk seemed more vibrant. A small change — the computer monitors for searching faced outward so the bookseller and customer could look at the screen simultaneously — made the space communal, a shared experience rather than a sterile exchange between clerk and consumer.
The large section for games in the back was better integrated with the books sections and seemed to be more organic than the previous, semi-walled off DVD/media section. Sure, there were still some of those tchotchkes and assorted bric-a-brac. An obsession with Polaroid cameras has carried over, but overall, it was a highly pleasant experience — and a very different one from just a year ago.
As I checked out, I even got a coupon for a buy-one-get-one-free cookie deal in the café. Score!
The only black mark: This particular store was not presently stocking either of my recently published books. Let’s get on that Daunt.
Daunt’s strategy, as reported in Publishers Weekly earlier this year, is to make Barnes & Noble stores more locally focused, empowering managers to merchandise books in ways they think are best suited to area customers. He says he wants the stores focused on, you know, books, because books are what people are looking for when they go into a bookstore.
We are probably still in the early stages of the transition, but so far, so good. We’ll see if it’s enough to save the company.
Of course, what Daunt is trying to achieve with his chain is already available at your local indie, staffed by passionate experts who are ready to help match reader and book.
It’s a good model. James Daunt is wise to follow it.