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Nathan Heller writes for the New Yorker (archived) about James Daunt, who runs much of the bookselling world and apparently does so surprisingly well:
Though less known than many authors, Daunt leads a bookselling empire of unprecedented scale. For seven years, he has been the chief executive of both the largest bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble, and the largest in the United Kingdom, Waterstones. He is the founder of what may be London’s most beloved independent bookshop, Daunt Books, whose reputation extends so far beyond the literary world that, when the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted an exhibition of influential bags, in 2020, it included the Daunt Books tote alongside a specimen by Chanel. In recent years, the British chains Foyles and Blackwell’s, as well as other independent stores in the U.K., have come under Daunt. So have the Tattered Cover, in Denver, and Books Inc., a chain around the San Francisco Bay. Daunt oversees more than a thousand stores and nearly twenty thousand employees, and presides over four billion dollars annually in sales. “He controls more than twenty per cent of our entire market,” the publisher of a major American imprint told me. “He is, I think, respected—and feared.”
Unusually for an executive of such power, Daunt, who is sixty-three, spent more than twenty years running his own bookshops in the leafy parts of London—lugging boxes, placing orders, and performing other Meg Ryan-ish chores. But the two disparate halves of his career look startlingly the same. As a global chief, Daunt gets around by subway and other unkingly conveyances. (Aside from monthly nighttime travel between New York and London, he flies coach.) At a time when the executive caste is often thought to carry élite managerial knowledge, he remains obsessed with details that concerned him when he ran his first independent shop. Dauntism—a set of precepts about the best way to stock, shelve, and display books, the best way to cultivate and promote booksellers, and the best way to appeal to readers—has radiated out to the whole of the U.K. and now, through Barnes & Noble, to places such as Wichita and Skokie, nurturing a spirit of renaissance in the trade. “I think many of us can remember a time, not so long ago, when Barnes & Noble briefly appeared to be evolving into a glorified toy store,” Jordan Pavlin, the publisher of Knopf, told me. “Now they’re bookstores again.” The author and former Times Literary Supplement editor Sir Ferdinand Mount, who used to be a neighbor of Daunt’s, wryly described him to me as “the most decent tycoon you could ever hope to meet.”
It’s very interesting to read about how he does it, but what I want to focus on is this passage about the perennial nobody-reads-any-more hand-wringing:
A reader of anything but books could be forgiven for thinking that we are living through a low point in literacy. It has been less than a year since the Reader’s Digest, noting statistics about pleasure reading, declared a “reading slump.” In May, the Wall Street Journal bemoaned a crash in the market for “dad books”: histories, theories, bewigged biographies. A summer Atlantic cover, with the headline “The Age of Reading Is Over,” channelled fears that we have entered what it called a “postliterate era,” as a consequence of phones, screens, and the rest of it. This month brought James Marriott, a British columnist, warning, “As reading declines, the result, evident all around us, is the intellectual hollowing out of our society.” That’s from “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society,” a Substack polemic that Marriott expanded into, of all things, a book. How dead can the nonfiction market be?
Actually, in America, the reading of books is up. Sales of print books have increased nearly twenty-five per cent from a decade ago. The number of independent bookstores in the United States has climbed steeply since 2009, with a seventy-per-cent increase since 2020. A survey by the Pew Research Center found that thirty-eight per cent of American adults read one to five books in 2025, and fourteen per cent read at least twenty. The global book market is expected to grow five per cent annually for the next several years; for the generation now entering college, book sales are at a lifetime high.
In its lament for fading literacy, the Atlantic mentioned current data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose reading survey of thousands of students began in 1971. “Just 35 percent of high-school seniors were ‘proficient’ at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument,” the magazine’s staff writer Rose Horowitch observed. That sounds bad, but the same figure a decade ago was thirty-seven per cent—just two points higher—and in the gloriously unwired age of 1992 it was forty. And the survey’s broad news was good. American nine-year-olds performed much better on reading assessments in 2025 than in 1971, and thirteen-year-olds’ performance held steady. The reading skills of English learners have risen in the past two decades, and, unlike in 1971, the top quarter of Black and Hispanic students today out-read the average white child.
“I thought that piece in the Atlantic made some good points, but the idea that reading has finished and we have moved into a kind of post-literate dark age strikes me as absurd,” Robert Darnton, a historian of the book and a former director of the Harvard University Library, told me. “ I have a little collection of jeremiads, and one is from 1928, when Walter Benjamin said, ‘Everything indicates that the book is nearing its end.’ ” He added, “There’s this unprecedented change in the technology of reading, and people are naturally reacting to that, because it’s disorienting. How do we make sense of changes that have hit us so fast?” “Every decade, there is a new scapegoat for why the reading public is diminishing,” Nancy Bass Wyden, who owns the Strand Book Store, told me. “The fact of the matter is that books are one of our most enduring forms of human expression.”
The illusion of decline might come in part because people consume books differently. Pew reported that, in 2025, the number of adults who read a print book during the year was eight percentage points less than it was in 2011—but that the number who read an e-book and the number who listened to an audiobook each increased by almost double the same proportion. (Other studies turn up a similar result; the National Endowment for the Arts, whose 2022 survey the Atlantic cited as its first data point for decline, noted in its own material that factoring in audiobooks eliminated any significant downturn.) Joel J. Miller, a former book editor and the author of a book about books (“The Idea Machine”), pored over data about the ostensible nonfiction crisis on his blog, Miller’s Book Review, this year, and found what he described to me as a dubious “confirmatory pattern that everything’s going to hell in a handbasket.” The media started measuring a decline, he noticed, at the peak of the pandemic, when adult-nonfiction sales had risen to unprecedented heights. When he zoomed out on the time span, total print sales came out slightly higher than they were before the pandemic. He factored in e-books and audiobooks, and they went higher still. The picture wasn’t of a crash but of a steady, gently climbing line with an anomalous hump in the middle.
I am encouraged in my resistance to apocalyptic memes, and freshly astonished that there are people who for some reason don’t count using e-books and audiobooks as “reading.” The snobbish gatekeepers we have always with us.
