The ’90s are back, and this time, Barnes & Noble is the underdog. CEO James Daunt explains how Barnes & Noble is different than Amazon.
To put it another way, they were hiring in various executives one after another from other retailers, each of them bringing a very rational chain-retail philosophy, which is that you try to run a very consistent retail operation and that you use your scale and leverage for both operational efficiencies and purchasing efficiencies. That works pretty much across the board, whether you’re Best Buy, Staples, Zara, H&M, whatever it is.
There was a time when the big chains were somewhat homogenous, and that was the threat to the book industry. Barnes & Noble at its peak was a national monster. It could drive the cultural discourse in this country by dint of just putting a book at the front of the store, whether or not the book was good. The independent booksellers hated Barnes & Noble for this reason.
And they’re very inclusive spaces. There’s nothing intimidating about them; their very size welcomes everybody into them. That part within a community, which allows kids falling out of school at 3:30PM or 4PM to just pour into a Barnes & Noble with no obligation to buy anything, to chat away, look at books, have fun, maybe buy a cup of coffee, and then be off, is that bit of the democratic side of Barnes & Noble, which is so powerful.
I knew that if we could simply strip away that central instruction and that central machine, we were first going to save an awful lot of money, because we wouldn’t need those people and we wouldn’t need the very expensive Manhattan offices in which they were residing. Second, I thought that if we did appeal directly to the booksellers, that some of them would start running much better bookstores. Most of them, it probably wouldn’t make too much difference to, and then some would get worse.
I think we explained exactly what we were doing and the rationale for it. We’re saying to the booksellers and the bookstore managers, “Look, you really have to take accountability and ownership of your stores. We are going to give you the tools to actually prove that you are good booksellers. We’re not going to tell you what books you’re going to have or what books to reorder. You have to make those decisions yourselves. You have to decide how you display them.
It was a good employment market then, so most of them went straight off to other jobs and didn’t feel that it was any personal judgment upon themselves. Therefore, for everybody who was left, it probably felt relatively positive, as far as these quite traumatic things can be.at its heart is a podcast about org charts. You’re describing a massive org chart change, right? What tools does a CEO have to solve problems? My theory is that the first one is the org chart.
I think traditional retail businesses tend to be quite masculine, and very hierarchical structures are often dominated by men, particularly men of a certain age. Obviously, as a late-50-year-old male, this is not a greenhouse I can really start slinging rocks around in. When you flatten organizations and have a lot more young people working in a much more collaborative way, you tend to end up with a structure which is very equal in terms of the balance and ends up more cooperative for that.
I think the centralized part, yes, not the cultural relevance. I think we have a huge part to play in positively promoting education, reading, and engagement with cultural issues, but I think we should always reflect the communities where we are. When you decentralize that to the individual stores, you get something much healthier than when it was directed from New York City, that’s for sure.
Well, we had things called co-op and promo fees, which were amounts of money paid for the placement of books. It would either be that you would take a certain number of books, in which case dollars were attached to that, and then in particular, that they would be placed in particular parts of the store. That was extremely attractive to publishers who take enormous risks with books.
What you’re describing is something that has a much more local feel to it, where the local bookstores get to look at their communities, look at who their customers are, and adjust the store to them. Then there’s a basic marketing level here, where you have to go tell the local community that this bookstore reflects their interest. You have to get them to show up and walk in the door.
Because we just leave them to get on with it, I think it has driven a massive part of our success. We were very lucky to have the good fortune of having liberated the stores at precisely the moment when it was most powerful for them to be able to adapt quickly and seamlessly to whatever was going on in their local community. It’s worked brilliantly for us.
They are really terrible at putting a book in front of you that you never thought you’d want to read, that you have no reason to read and no tether to at all. Whereas a bookstore is precisely the place that does that. You pick up the book that you never thought you would want to read, might read, or could even think about reading, by an author you’ve never even heard of until that moment.
Yeah, though, personally, I don’t see it that way. I think the more reading there is going on in the community, the better it is ultimately for us. By the way, much as I love bookstores and booksellers, we sit in the second rung beneath public libraries and public librarians. They’re the true heroes of our industry, and they don’t sell a single book. They’re sitting in there doling them out for free.
You need physical bookshops to have proper discovery. Physical bookshops are the things that I love and they are my vocational commitment. So if I understood the question right, are they necessary? It’s very difficult for independents to do anything more than be what the vast majority of independents are, which is a single store. The number of independents with more than one store is extremely small, and the number of independents who are growing is minuscule. This is why you need the big guy in there, otherwise, you’re just not going to have enough bookstores.
That is the extraordinary thing about a bookstore. It’s almost unique — and I would actually claim is unique amongst retailers — that we appeal to every single age. Kids love us. A baby in a stroller loves being in a bookstore, all the way to the oldest citizen. Everybody has a place and a different way of engaging with a bookstore. That translates into the various social media platforms as well, but we have to do it authentically and we have to do it locally.
That is not to say we should ban the other side. We are a place that should carry everything, but we do seek to exclude from our stores things that are beyond an acceptable level. If it’s racist, antisemitic, pedophilic, or absolutely egregious in all of these different ways, then those books have no part in our bookstore and we don’t have them. It is a delicate balance sometimes as to where that line should be drawn.
I picked Marx and Engels because it’s the silliest one. A good bookstore should have all of those authors on the shelf, it’s what they do. You walked right into. This is the one that I think is the hottest button. It is even more treacherous to navigate in the UK. What is your stance there? Is it, “We’re just going to let the bookstore owners do what they want,” or is it, “This is horrible for our business if we don’t sellIt’s not horrible for our business.
We haven’t got to a point where something that extreme has felt reasonable by anybody working for us. We’re extremely fortunate that booksellers are not extreme people. I mean, we are very thoughtful. Otherwise, why on earth would you be in bookselling? We have to be constructive and part of the debate, but I believe that we should generally stock as broad a range of books as we can. I haven’t myself come across anything within that sphere which has caused me to say, “No, this is unacceptable.” Something like Holocaust denial, we would not have that in our stores. But if the local community is objecting to a particular book, I’ll be saying, “Well, there’s nothing obliging you to either read or buy this book.
Well, I suppose that sort of takes us back to what the purpose of a bookstore is. A bookstore is somewhere that curates. I mean, even the largest of the Barnes & Nobles has a fraction of the books that are published from reputable publishers, let alone from all of the nonsense of self-publishing. Not all self-publishing is nonsense, by the way, but a dramatic amount of it is. These AI, bot-driven books will be that.
You bring up the fact that it’s a physical object. You still run the Nook, which is an e-reader, an e-book store, you do have a bit of an audiobook business. Those are much more central and much more internet-driven and platform-driven. Are they growing? Are they a focus for you, or is it just that customers expect that extension from a bookseller, so you have them?
Yeah, that’s run entirely independently. In fact, since I’ve joined, we’ve invested in new devices and have a couple more that are coming down the track. All I’ve said is, “If we do anything, let’s do it really well.” Therefore, we’ve just launched the audio subscription business, and as I said, invested in a whole new family of Nooks. If you are big enough to be able to make those investments, then just do it really well.
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