Times may be tough on the high street but the bookseller Waterstones is enjoying strong sales as younger adults embrace reading as an escape from their screens and as online competition eases.
“People have come back to reading and buying books in bookshops as we have made a place which is an enjoyable and effective way to buy books,” says James Daunt, the CEO of the British retailer, which has 320 UK bookshops and owns the Foyles, Hatchards and Blackwell’s names, and whose parent group also owns Barnes & Noble, the US’s largest bookstore chain.
Daunt says Waterstones’s sales revenues are up 5%, about half of which is down to higher prices. The rest is a result of selling “lots and lots of books” as, he says, younger adults are being inspired to pick up a paperback by social media, such as the trend for TikTok recommendations known as BookTok, and book clubs in real life.
“They want to do something not staring at a screen and relatively inexpensive, and once people start collecting books they just buy more,” Daunt says. “BookTok is an easy label to put on it, but this is about people wanting to read and talk about books.”
He says that while some trends in reading can be quite local, there have been waves of interest in subjects from romance to romantasy to fantasy that have caught the public’s imagination.
Waterstones in Bradford, in the old Wool Exchange building. The chain wants to make its stores attractive places to go. Photograph: Phil Greenwood/The Guardian
Waterstones’s figures indicate that a boom in UK sales of fiction last year – with sales up 12.2%, according to the Publishers Association – has continued into 2025, despite concerns about a squeeze on household budgets.
The fiction rise offset a 2.8% fall in sales of children’s books and a decline in nonfiction sales that meant the UK print book market as a whole, which makes up about 80% of sales, shrank 1%, while digital sales rose 17%.
Daunt says bookshops continue to benefit from parents bringing in their children to enthuse them about reading, and Waterstones has made efforts to improve the attractiveness of its stores as places to go, with cafes, and books reviewed and picked out by local staff.
The company is opening 10 new stores a year in the UK. It is considering new kinds of locations, from inside department stores to parts of the country where it is less well known, such as Northern Ireland and Scotland.
It announced plans last week to open two more outlets in John Lewis department stores – in Cheadle, Greater Manchester, and Bluewater, Kent – after the success of its branch at the chain’s flagship site on Oxford Street in London. Those outlets are in addition to five in Next stores as the company tries to find locations that are convenient for shoppers.
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James Daunt says growth is stronger in the US, where the Barnes & Noble chain is benefiting from Waterstones’ experience in the UK. Photograph: José A Alvarado Jr./The Guardian
The business, which was bought by the hedge fund Elliott Advisors in 2018, is also benefiting from the demise of some key rivals, such as the closure of the Irish retailer Eason in Northern Ireland and difficulties at WH Smith, which is now concentrated in travel locations such as railway stations and airports after selling off its high street arm, which is being renamed TGJones.
Daunt says Waterstones has been keen to hold on to its shops, even in less affluent areas where other national retailers have exited – such as Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, which is now seeing a resurgence thanks to new orders for the local employer BAE Systems. “If you stay in these places the pendulum does swing back,” he says.
He says growth is stronger in the US than in the UK because the demise of bookshops there “has been more savage”. The Barnes & Noble chain, also owned by Elliott and where Daunt is also the CEO, is benefiting in the US – where it is planning 60 new stores a year – from building on experience with Waterstones to open “much, much better bookshops” and training up and empowering its booksellers, he says.