Daunt tells booksellers 'don't be boring' to survive Amazon era

Bookshops need to avoid being “boring” and apply a “bookseller's mind” to data if they want to survive in an era dominated by Amazon, Waterstones m.d. and Barnes & Noble c.e.o. James Daunt has said.

In a keynote speech at the Futurebook conference in London's Bishopsgate, Daunt, who recently took the top job at Barnes & Noble, said the US firm's stores had suffered from being “crucifyingly boring” and had “degraded the role of the bookseller”.

He said the importance of three principles still held in 2019 – having a good bookshop with personality, filling it up with well curated stock and having great staff who are developed and trained.

Daunt said: “We have to treat data in a different way. We're an industry where data has been prevalent for certainly my entire career.”

He said data had not been used to the benefit of the bookstores, explaining: “I now arrive at Barnes & Noble where they've had a loyalty programme forever and a day. And yet, if you walk into any of the Barnes & Noble bookstores they are the most crucifyingly boring stores. Which is odd, because they know what people want, they have all this data and yet they can't interpret it and they've been unable to manipulate that knowledge to in any way deliver decent bookstores to people."

The Waterstones boss said the same thing applied to the online store which was “boring” too and without the efficiency of Amazon. Daunt explained: “I think the one thing that you can never be if you want to live in this new bookselling age of Amazon is boring.”

Daunt predicted B&N's “relentless decline” would start to slow by this time next year, with people seeing a different business in 2021/22. He said B&N staff would be tasked with “driving out the boring” and reimagining their stores, giving them personality. Online, businesses needed personality too, he said.

“It's about disassociating yourself from the intricate detail of the data into aggregating it and applying a bookseller judgment to it," he explained. "It's about how you bring personality to your online communication, the email, the social media presence and particularly online as well.”

He said B&N had reduced itself to something “as banal as Amazon but without the strengths”, adding: “If you're not as efficient, if you're not as cheap, if you don't have the ability to leverage all these other connection you have with the customer and you have no personality then you're going to be destroyed.”

“We have to use our character and personality, the curation and the intellectual engagement that we have as booksellers with the titles that are published, an ability to seize the book that not many have noticed, to champion it, to spread it,” he went on. “If we can't do that then we have no role and we'll be destroyed.”