What’s more, Amazon is actually getting more people into reading, he argues.
“Once you start owning books, then you get bookshelves and you’re going to turn up in a bookshop pretty soon. Amazon has actually helped us.
“One of the spurs for the growth of the book industry as a whole has been this popularisation of book ownership that has happened dramatically over the last 30 years and you can see that in the prosperity of publishers.”
Amazon “is a big part of that and we’re also on the coattails”, he added.
Still, he is not blind to the pressures on the book-selling industry. “Book selling has always been a very tough trade. Profitability has been awful and just over the passage of my career, most people go bust.”
For Mr Daunt, it has been a different story. His first foray into the market – in 1990 when he was just 26 – was Daunt Books, which he launched from a single bookshop on Marylebone High Street. Eventually, he went on to grow it into a successful small chain.
When Russian businessman Alexander Mamut was looking for someone to turn around Waterstones in 2011 – a business he had bought for £53m – he chose Mr Daunt. The bet paid off. In 2018, activist investor Elliott paid a reported £200m for the company. Waterstones has since bought smaller chains Foyles and Blackwell’s, deals Mr Daunt said had to happen to keep those bookshops afloat.
“We only own them out of necessity, not out of desire. I would much rather Foyles had carried on independently.”
Mr Daunt said Waterstones, which has more than 290 shops, is “chugging along fine and now, there’s not much to be done there”.
“The way of running it sort of involves doing successively less. That’s the whole point. I’m maybe being slightly facetious but the thing is, the less I do, the cleverer everyone thinks I am.”
Instead, most of Mr Daunt’s time is taken up with another business. Since 2019, he has been steering a turnaround of Barnes & Noble, having been drafted in by Elliott to implement the play-book that revived Waterstones.
Nowadays he spends three weeks a month in the US and then one in the UK. “All the issues in Barnes & Noble are identical to what was at Waterstones.”
Mr Daunt has already made progress although there is still some way to go.
“Barnes & Noble is probably Waterstones circa 2016 right now, which implies that the turnaround is going slightly slower. But you have to remember we had Covid in between. And if you eliminate that part, it’s a little bit quicker.”
One new challenge he faces is AI-written books. Unlike Waterstones, Barnes & Noble sells ebooks and Mr Daunt has to contend with “vastly more” self-published works.
“Artificial intelligence has meant that there has been a dramatic increase in self-publishing and mostly what it’s trying to do is make you think it’s a mainstream book that it isn’t.
“It can be some garbage that AI has written in the style of a well-known author that it might trick you into buying. We’re endlessly putting in filters to keep that out, let alone anything anti-Semitic or racist. Very little gets through.”
Vetting can be a minefield. “We have been accused of either taking out all the books by pro trans authors or anti trans authors, or books being in the wrong part of the store.”
That leads to the subject of politics. Mr Daunt oversaw the opening of a big new Barnes & Noble shop in Georgetown, Washington, the day after the US election. “I must say, it was all very subdued.”
However, he is glad that it is now out of the way. “For us, we always do badly whenever anything is going on in the world. When the world is boring, we do rather better. Having a result that nobody’s contesting is great. It means now everyone settles down and they can get shopping.”