Waterstones is enjoying strong sales as more young adults embrace reading rather than screens. “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,” James Daunt, the British retailer’s CEO said.
Waterstones has 320 bookshops in the UK, owns Foyles, Hatchards, and Blackwell’s, and is itself owned by Barnes & Noble, America’s largest book chain. According to Daunt, the retailer has seen sales revenues up by 5%, thanks in part to more younger adults picking up books. One reason for this is social media, including a TikTok trend known as BookTok, as well as book clubs.
“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.” While some trends in reading are local, there has been a wave of interest in subjects such as romance, fantasy, and romantasy, a combination of the two.
Figures from Waterstones shows a boom in UK sales of fiction last year, with the Publishers Association reporting sales increase of around 12.2%. The rise in fiction offsets the 2.8% fall in children’s books and a decline in nonfiction sales. It also shows that the print book market in the UK, 80% of book sales, shrank by 1%, while digital sales rose by 17%.
Bookshops, Daunt says, benefit from more parents bringing their children in to encourage them to read and Waterstones has made efforts to encourage this, including cafes and books chosen by local staff.
The company opened an additional 10 new stores in the UK and is considering new locations, such as department stores and parts of the country where it is less well known. This includes Northern Ireland and Scotland.
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