James Daunt makes the case for booksellers: reading grows in bookshops
The New Yorker profile published on 19 October reopens the discussion about bookshops and the discovery of books.
A bookshop can do more than serve existing demand: it can help create it. That is the perspective emerging from Nathan Heller’s profile of James Daunt, published by The New Yorker on 19 October. The head of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones defends booksellers’ role and individual shops’ autonomy.
The news is this fresh contribution to the reading debate, not an announcement of a reorganisation. For readers, the question is practical: finding shelves that can surprise them, rather than an identical selection everywhere. For those working with books, human mediation comes back into focus: knowing a community and making discovery possible.