Everyday I Right the Book

Thanks to Amazon, Barnes & Noble went from being the bully on the block to an underdog struggling to survive, and the pandemic left the one-time behemoth struggling to survive. But then the plot changed. “The ghost of Barnes & Noble past meets the spirit of Barnes & Noble future in a single shopping center in a suburb of Baltimore. The new store in Pikesville, Md., separated by half a parking lot from its shuttered predecessor, is part of an unlikely plot twist: Barnes & Noble is staging its largest expansion in over a decade.” NPR: How Barnes & Noble turned a page, expanding for the first time in years. One of the company’s biggest shifts was to drop the algorithms and the pay-for-placement and just let the local store managers decide what to feature.

+ Barnes & Noble borrowed a lot of ideas from indie bookstores. Why? NYT from July: Some Surprising Good News: Bookstores Are Booming and Becoming More Diverse. And they’re not cooking the books…

+ But don’t worry about Amazon. The company sold close to $40bn of advertising last year – bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry.