Reading in decline? Barnes & Noble is un-Daunt-ed

This long New Yorker profile of Barnes & Noble CEO and longtime bookstore tycoon James Daunt was fascinating if you’re a bookish nerd like me. I wrote about Daunt before in the context of B&N’s positive turnaround, but this piece was more about its place in the ongoing discourse about the supposed “decline of reading”. Here are some bits I found especially noteworthy. Shoutout to Bill Nighy, a real one: Daunt Books grew for years as a quiet shop with a devoted following. “You felt the people who worked there were believers,” the actor Bill Nighy, a regular since the nineties, said. (He continues to give people its book-subscription service at Christmas. “If anyone knew how much time and money I spend in bookshops, they would say, ‘What the fuck?’” he said. “It is made more delicious by the fact that books were dead, officially, about ten years ago.”) Why bookstores are a fundamentally different business from Amazon: The idea that consumer companies are in the stuff business is still…