The New Age of Reading

Author: Nathan Heller, The New Yorker (“Popular Chronicles”), October 19, 2026 — in the October 26, 2026 issue URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/26/james-daunt-profile How it reached the wiki: bookselling was in a panic… (tweet) — Rob Henderson, Oct 26, 2026. Dek: Alarm about declining interest in books is perpetual. But, as bookselling reaches unexpected heights, James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, thinks a different future is at hand.

[PARTIAL] The article is behind the New Yorker paywall. This page holds only the public dek, the opening scene and the passage Henderson quoted. Paste the full text (or your highlights) to complete it.

Key claims (from what is public)

• James Daunt — chief executive of Barnes and Noble, called “the most important man in bookselling” — argues a literary culture is something booksellers are well placed to build, and that a different future for reading is at hand.
• Bookselling is at unexpected heights. The profile opens with Daunt visiting a Barnes & Noble in Eatontown, New Jersey, a strip of malls and big-box stores most people “would have said” was “no place to put a bookstore”; to Daunt it was “the landscape for a new, improbable kind of success.”
• The Kindle panic didn’t come true. Per the passage Henderson quoted, e-readers have plateaued at about 10% of traditional publishers’ revenue, while about 75% comes from paper books.

Notable quotes

“bookselling was in a panic about the Kindle…Today, the e-reader market has plateaued at some 10% of traditional publishers’ revenue, while about 75% comes from paper books, a technology essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century” — as quoted by Rob Henderson

How it connects

• We’re about to enter a… (tweet) — Paul Graham the same day, predicting not reading or writing becomes as common as smoking once was. The two pieces pull in opposite directions.
• Seneca on why reading deeply… (tweet) — reading deeply rather than widely.
• Barnes and Noble.