Barnes and Noble
Barnes and Noble
America’s largest brick-and-mortar book retailer, under CEO James Daunt — described by The New Yorker (October 2026) as “the most important man in bookselling.” Daunt’s thesis: alarm about declining reading is perpetual, but bookselling is reaching “unexpected heights,” and a literary culture is something booksellers are uniquely placed to build.
The Kindle didn’t kill them. The e-reader market has plateaued at roughly 10% of traditional publishers’ revenue, while ~75% still comes from print books — a technology essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century. Daunt visited a strip-mall location in Eatontown, New Jersey that most people “would have said was no place to put a bookstore” and called it “the landscape for a new, improbable kind of success.” (The New Age of Reading)
The counter-positioning example. Amazon used Barnes & Noble as a counter-positioning target during its retail expansion: online buying cannibalized physical-retail margins without requiring the in-store experience B&N had built around. B&N couldn’t respond without destroying its own economics. Ben Thompson’s distillation applied: being better at in-store wouldn’t have saved them, but the response couldn’t replicate the moat either — which is why they survived to be resurrected under Daunt while many predicted bankruptcy. (An Ode to Counter-Positioning, Every Moat Becomes Moot)