From $683 Million Buyout to 50 New Stores a Year
When Elliott Advisors took Barnes & Noble private in 2019 for $683 million, the chain was a cautionary tale: more than 100 stores shuttered, six CEOs in a decade, a $1 billion loss on the failed Nook e-reader, and shelves that looked identical from Manhattan to Michigan. Elliott's answer was James Daunt — a British bookseller who had already rescued Elliott-owned Waterstones and who ran the ten-store Daunt Books in London, a destination beloved for its browsing-friendly displays and oak-paneled galleries.
Daunt's diagnosis was blunt. Barnes & Noble, like Waterstones before it, suffered from uniformity that bored customers and demoralized staff.
Killing Co-Op, Freeing the Store
The first thing Daunt eliminated was 'co-op advertising' — a longstanding industry practice in which publishers gave Barnes & Noble a discount on books in exchange for guaranteed shelf placement at every location nationwide. The arrangement delivered predictable revenue but produced what Daunt calls 'really dispiriting, anodyne stores because they were all the same, selling the same old books, the same authors, the same bestsellers.'
'We abandoned it 100%,' Daunt told Fortune. 'Now each store curates its own assortment, reorders books according to what its customers are actually interested in and does their own thing.'
Decision-making moved out of New York headquarters and into small regional store clusters, each empowered to stock what local readers actually buy. Daunt also began placing smaller initial orders on individual titles while expanding the total number of titles carried — creating a sense of discovery for customers and making the floor a more engaging place to work.
The Numbers the Market Is Watching
Barnes & Noble does not disclose financials as a private company. But the operational signals are hard to miss. Elliott has opened dozens of new Barnes & Noble stores annually for three consecutive years, including 50 in the past year alone. The chain's store count is approaching its all-time high of nearly 800, reached in the mid-2000s, though many new locations are smaller than the big-box formats it closed last decade. Multiple media outlets reported this spring that Elliott is eyeing an IPO for the combined Barnes & Noble and Waterstones entity at a valuation of $4 billion. Daunt declined to discuss a potential listing.
For context, this is a retailer that spent much of the 2010s looking like the next Borders — the now-defunct chain that collapsed entirely.
What the Turnaround Actually Proves
The Barnes & Noble story is not complicated. A private owner with a long time horizon bought a broken asset, installed an operator with relevant expertise, stripped out a centralized bureaucratic practice that was killing store culture, and returned authority to the people closest to the customer. No government subsidy. No DEI rebranding campaign. No pivot to a subscription app. Just inventory discipline, local accountability, and workers who are actually encouraged to talk about books.
The market has already voted: 50 new stores in a single year and a potential $4 billion IPO are not the outcomes of a company limping along. They are the outcomes of free enterprise working the way it is supposed to — capital allocated by results, not by committee. If Elliott does take the company public, shareholders will be buying a proof of concept as much as a bookstore chain.
