The New Age of Reading

James Daunt is profiled as the most consequential figure in contemporary bookselling: a former London indie-shop owner who now runs Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, oversees roughly a thousand stores, nearly twenty thousand employees, and about four billion dollars in annual sales, and is credited with controlling more than twenty percent of the market. His retail philosophy - dubbed Dauntism - privileges local curation, visual merchandising (covers faced out, generous space for key titles), and empowerment of individual booksellers over centralized corporate control. Visiting a suburban Barnes & Noble in Eatontown, he inspects displays, inventories, and local tastes the way he did in his first shop, arguing that returning stores to the feel and expertise of independents has reanimated chains and restored bookstores’ cultural standing.

The profile also reframes widespread alarm about a supposed decline in reading. Despite jeremiads in outlets that call modern readers postliterate, industry data show print-book sales up roughly twenty-five percent over the past decade, a seventy-percent rise in independent-store numbers since 2020, and robust readership metrics: a 2025 Pew survey found 38 percent of adults read one to five books and 14 percent read twenty or more. Long-term assessments are mixed - high-school proficiency on complex-reading tasks hovers around 35 percent - but younger children and many historically underserved groups have improved, and increases in e-book and audiobook consumption offset apparent drops in print participation. Daunt’s conviction is that well-stocked, locally curated stores can build and sustain a renewed literary culture.