Bookstores are Back, Baby!

Anyone who experienced the wave of bookstore closures that started in the early-2000s knows how painful it is to see the one or two national or independent bookstores in your area shut down for good.

That meant no more Borders, no more B. Daltons and no more Waldenbooks in your area mall (weren’t those stores fun to browse through? I miss that.) Books-A-Million went through some changes—but is still chugging along in some regions—and Barnes & Noble reigned as one of the last major national bookstore chains standing.

At the time, I guess the prevailing thought was that we’d all be consuming content digitally in X number of years, so why bother with bricks-and-mortar anymore? Well it seems we’ve come full circle since then, and at least one nearby, refreshed Barnes & Noble store is definitely a testament to that.

It’s hopefully also a testament for what’s to come. And based on how full the parking lot and aisles were during opening week, all signs point to a renewed appreciation for physical bookstores as community hubs, tactile browsing experiences and spaces that digital platforms simply cannot replicate.

And this isn’t only happening in Tampa either. My daughter saw a similar scene at the Barnes & Noble at The Grove in Los Angeles just last month. All this to say, bookstores are back, and they’re better than ever. Companies are using more of their vertical space, facing books forward to entice readers with covers (versus spines) and making the overall experience more engaging and inviting.

If you’re interested in the backstory of how Barnes & Noble pulled itself out of a slump, modernized its stores and got people to start coming back to them again, Morning Brew’s Sam Klebanov does a great job of dissecting the company’s reemergence in this short YouTube clip.