Barnes & Noble, the world's largest brick-and-mortar bookstore in the United States, is ready for a splashy return to the stock market. It comes exactly 10 years after Amazon, which had dominated the online book market, opened its first physical bookstore in Seattle in Nov. 2015. At the time, pessimism spread in the United States that "Amazon, which toppled bookstores, is opening a bookstore," and that the last offline stronghold had been ceded to online.
But after 10 years, Barnes & Noble has moved beyond a mere survival report and is pursuing an initial public offering (IPO) to regain recognition for a corporate value in the trillions of won. Experts are watching how the bookstore giant that once knelt before Amazon's relentless onslaught has transformed back into a "company that attracts investment."
According to the investment banking (IB) industry and foreign media on the 19th, Elliott Management, an activist hedge fund that owns both Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, the largest bookstore chain in the United Kingdom, is in full-fledged review of consolidating the two chains and listing them on the U.S. or U.K. stock market in the second half of next year.
According to the Financial Times (FT), Elliott recently began the process of selecting advisers for a combined listing of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. It is weighing the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) as the listing venue.
Citing sources, the FT said Elliott currently prefers a London listing. London's market has a higher preference than New York's for retail corporations that generate stable cash flow. Investor tendencies on the London market also lean more toward expecting higher dividend yields, allowing a hedge fund to command a higher valuation at listing. If the combined listing succeeds in the second half of next year, its valuation of about $683 million (about 990.3 billion won) when Elliott acquired it in 2019 is estimated to swell to at least several trillion won.
The financial outlet MarketMinute said, "The U.K. stock market, which values revenue and dividends, may better fit the new identity Barnes & Noble is pursuing than the U.S. market, which emphasizes growth," adding, "Which of London or New York lands the two bookstore chains will be a key inflection point in the battle to attract similar retail corporations to list."
Experts said the listing push overturns the conventional wisdom in investment markets that "the age of bookstores is over." Since acquiring Barnes & Noble in 2019, Elliott has shown that offline distribution channels can have strong self-sufficiency by maximizing store-level autonomy.
In the past, Barnes & Noble displayed the headquarters-picked bestsellers the same way across its stores nationwide. It placed books in prime spots for which publishers had paid advertising fees. This standardization strategy improved logistics efficiency. But it killed the bookstore's character. Readers turned away from unappealing physical stores and went to Amazon, where prices were cheaper.
Chief Executive Officer James Daunt, who took office with the 2019 acquisition of Barnes & Noble, redefined Barnes & Noble as a community hub rather than a challenger to Amazon. Daunt was the relief pitcher Elliott brought in after acquiring the U.K.'s Waterstones in 2018. Since 2019, he has run both companies at the same time.
Right after taking office, Daunt cut headquarters staff by more than half. He judged it more effective to grant autonomy to employees who fill the space so they can reflect local readers' tastes, rather than spending on flashy interiors. He gave store managers nationwide full authority over ordering and displaying books and running events. Decisions on what books to bring in, how to display them, and what events to host were made on the ground. Since then, Barnes & Noble shelves have each taken on different colors, like an art bookstore in New York or a community-anchored bookstore in Texas.
When employees who had displayed books as instructed by headquarters began to act like neighborhood bookstore owners, readers returned. According to an internal Barnes & Noble survey, "the more a store has employees with strong knowledge of books, the more consumer dwell time and satisfaction rose in proportion." In an interview with CNBC this month, CEO Daunt said, "2025 was a fantastic year for us," adding, "We opened 67 new stores in the United States alone."
Waterstones, which adopted the same management strategy earlier, also increased its stores by 22% from 238 to 290 after Elliott's 2018 acquisition. According to U.K. accounting disclosures, Waterstones' sales jumped 17% from 452.5 million pounds in 2023 to 528.4 million pounds (about 1.04 trillion won) last year. Over the same period, profit after tax rose by 2.7 times, continuing solid growth.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said the revival of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones is less a rebound of the bookstore industry as a whole than a victory of efficient management philosophy. Barnes & Noble plans to use funds raised from the listing mainly for liability repayment, new store expansion, and strengthening digital infrastructure, according to reports. It is an attempt to shift the business essence from a traditional bookstore platform that sells content called books to a "space business," like the coffee franchise Starbucks, where people linger and connect.
The FT said Barnes & Noble and Waterstones "placed books that went viral on social media services (SNS) like TikTok at the front of stores and created an environment where the digital generation can take snapshots and linger in physical stores, realizing in offline space the 'joy of discovery' that cannot be felt on Amazon."
However, the fact that a hedge fund named Elliott is the largest shareholder is a variable. Experts added that if Elliott sells its equity after the listing and exits, there remains a risk that successor management will revert to the previous centralized general bookstore model.