Barnes & Noble Surpasses 720 Stores Nationwide
Not long ago the conventional wisdom on Barnes & Noble was simple: it was losing. Amazon was winning. E-readers were taking over. The big box bookstore was a relic waiting to finish dying.
That story didn't end the way anyone expected.
Barnes & Noble has now topped 720 stores nationwide — up from fewer than 600 locations as recently as 2023. The chain has opened 28 new stores in 2026 alone across 15 states and Washington D.C., with dozens more planned before the year ends. New locations are landing in California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and beyond — a mix of urban flagships and suburban shopping centers that suggests the company is betting broadly rather than narrowly on where book lovers live.
High-profile openings include a store in the historic Marshall Field's building in Oak Park, Illinois, and a flagship in Washington D.C.'s storied Woodward & Lothrop building. In Chicago alone, Barnes & Noble has opened four locations this year.
Why This Is Actually Working
The turnaround isn't accidental and it didn't happen through discounts or gimmicks. When British bookseller James Daunt took over as CEO in 2019, he made one core bet: stop running Barnes & Noble like a corporate retail chain and let local booksellers run their stores like independent bookshops.
That meant decentralizing inventory decisions. Local managers could stock what their community actually wanted to read rather than what corporate decided to push from a central warehouse. BookTok tables went in quickly when TikTok's book community started driving viral sales. Staff recommendations got prominent placement. Stores started feeling less like a warehouse for whatever publisher paid for end-cap space and more like the kind of place where a knowledgeable person might actually help you find something you'd love.
BookTok — the books corner of TikTok that has driven an estimated 20 million or more book sales annually since 2021 — has been a significant tailwind. When a book goes viral online, readers go looking for it in physical stores. Barnes & Noble leaned into that dynamic rather than fighting it, creating dedicated displays for viral titles and giving local staff the flexibility to respond to trends in real time.
The result is a bookstore that feels more curated, more local, and more worth visiting than it did a decade ago — even if it's technically the same national chain.
The Bigger Picture
Barnes & Noble's revival is one piece of a broader and surprising story about physical retail and books specifically. Print book sales have remained remarkably resilient — the industry sold approximately 767 million print books in 2025, holding roughly steady with pre-pandemic levels despite every prediction that digital would continue to cannibalize physical sales.
Independent bookstores have also been on a quiet growth streak, with the American Booksellers Association reporting consistent increases in member stores throughout the early 2020s. People apparently still want to browse physical books in physical spaces — to hold them, read the back cover, flip through the first few pages, discover something by accident on a shelf they weren't heading toward.
What Barnes & Noble figured out is that it can compete with that experience if it stops trying to be a corporate machine and starts trying to be a bookstore.
720 stores. More coming. Nobody saw this one coming ten years ago.
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