Bookstore giant Barnes & Noble announced that it is opening at least 60 new retail stores in the U.S. in 2025. The dramatic rise in new stores continues a trend the chain started started in 2023, when the corporation opened 30 new U.S. stores.
At that time, CEO James Daunt told the Wall Street Journal: “We’ve now got both the profitability and the confidence to start opening up stores again.”
[This comes after numerous predictions of the company’s imminent demise. Writing in 2023 about Barnes & Noble’s recovery after its “near-death experience,” the LA Times reported: “At the end of 2018, the giant bookselling chain reported its seventh quarterly loss in a row, red ink of $27.3 million on sales of $117.2 million.”]
At its peak, around 2008, Barnes & Noble had approximately 725 locations in the U.S. In the 2010s, the company closed nearly 150 locations. After adding the significant slate of new stores in 2023, Daunt followed up with additional 57 in 2024. Today there are approximately 600 stores in the U.S.
While Barnes & Noble aims to open 60 new stores this year, the company is also shuttering some outlets.
The company is also adjusting its retail approach for certain locales. The footprint of some new Barnes & Noble stores will be smaller than the company’s more traditional outlets, as new stores are set for affluent neighborhoods including Georgetown in Washington, DC and the Upper East Side in Manhattan, where a 7,000-sq.ft. store will open near a closed 50,000 sq. ft. location.
Fast Company attributes the resurgence to TikTok’s #BookTok (a community on the app where users share videos about the books they read) and “a rise in so-called third spaces.” Third spaces being a place to hang out outside of one’s home and office space.
The TikTok phenomenon may cut both ways as far as books go, boosting sales now while undermining a future of attentive readers — at least according to Barnes & Noble’s own best-selling book.
The longstanding #1 non-fiction book on the Barnes & Noble list is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, who co-wrote The Coddling of the American Mind.
The Anxious Generation looks at the mental health impacts of phone use by children.
As seen below, in an interview in December, Haidt said “TikTok has a devastating impact on people’s ability to pay attention. It’s the most addictive. It sucks up time, and it’s horrible.” He added, “So the message to parents would be, I’d say the worst single thing for your kid is TikTok. I don’t think anybody should be on TikTok including adults.”
