Illustration: Shira Inbar for Bloomberg Businessweek
Tyler Kramer is turning 38, but he’s bouncing around the store like a little kid. His wife has given him the ultimate birthday gift: three minutes to race around the aisles of Barnes & Noble, filling his basket. He grabs a mix of classics, including Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, and more recent cult hits, such as Pierce Brown’s Dark Age and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. A video of the bookshop sweep, which has almost half a million views on TikTok, captures what Kramer calls his “best birthday ever.”
The video is a window into the online buzz that’s helped Barnes & Noble Booksellers Inc., America’s largest brick-and-mortar bookstore, make an unlikely comeback. Thanks to a pandemic-era swarm to BookTok—the name TikTok’s book-loving community coined for itself—US readers are more quickly discovering titles and recommending them to friends and followers. That has offered Barnes & Noble, which reported seven straight years of falling sales before it became the target of a billionaire hedge fund owner in 2019, a chance to resurrect itself.
Illustration: Shira Inbar for Bloomberg Businessweek
James Daunt, the chief executive officer instated by Elliott Management Corp. to run the retailer, says Barnes & Noble is growing again. Sales are up by the “mid-single digits” since 2021, the company says. Last year, it opened 57 stores, the most in a single year since at least 2007—and it plans to open more than 60 this year. Many of the new locations are in major markets, including Las Vegas, Santa Monica, California and Washington, DC.
These spaces look different from the Barnes & Nobles of the past. The company’s new management took advantage of pandemic-era shutdowns to reorganize stores and selections, culling less popular titles and creating more communal spaces to encourage shoppers to stay and hang out—something rival Amazon.com Inc. hasn’t been able to pull off. The chain has also fully embraced books popularized by online creators, prominently displaying tables of trendy titles like Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses and Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series under BookTok signage. Influencers on BookTok—and BookTube and Bookstagram, the YouTube and Instagram equivalents—have helped these titles go viral by posting video reviews, promoting their favorites and unpacking their bookstore hauls in front of the camera.
Barnes & Noble has become something of a gathering place for book influencers. Indeed, many of them never stopped picking up books in person, but now they’re bringing their followers along to the store. “I’ve been shopping at Barnes & Noble for as long as I can remember,” says Simone Jung, a 39-year-old content creator who started her Instagram account in 2016 to connect with people who also love books. (Today she has more than 77,000 followers, who often leave dozens of comments connecting with her on the titles she posts about.) When she goes to Barnes & Noble now, Jung recognizes many of the covers lining the shelves from her online community and hears other shoppers doing the same. “I’ll see a little group of people hanging around a certain section of books, and being like ‘Oh my gosh, I read that one!’ or ‘I heard that one on BookTok,’” she says. Barnes & Noble was one of the first places where Jung noticed dedicated displays for BookTok hits.
Illustration: Shira Inbar for Bloomberg Businessweek
The success is a turnaround for Barnes & Noble. As a rising Amazon ate into book sales beginning in the mid-1990s, the chain made a number of unsuccessful stabs to stay relevant, pushing too far into toys, games and other nontraditional items, expanding into weaker geographic markets and launching an e-book device that never quite caught up with Amazon’s Kindle. “The stores became sort of uglier and less coherent and less attractive, and people didn’t really want to be in them,” Daunt, 61, says of the chain’s later years as a publicly traded company, before he was instated by the new owners. “The trouble with Barnes & Noble is it just ran really bad bookstores.”
The future of TikTok isn’t clear in the US: In January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order giving the popular China-based app a 75-day reprieve from a US ban put in place because of national security concerns.
Still, Daunt says he’s convinced book-obsessed readers will still find their way to the store. “Harry Potter was a bookstore thing. People queued up at midnight to come to bookstores,” says Daunt, who’s been a bookseller for about 35 years. He also runs UK bookstore Waterstones, which Elliott also owns. With or without BookTok, book sellers hope readers will still visit physical bookstores whenever they want a sense of community—or to instantaneously pick up the next big thing without waiting for delivery. “Most of these book phenomena are actually embedded in the bookstore infrastructure.”