The chain that was supposed to go the way of Borders
For most of the 2010s, the safe prediction about Barnes & Noble was that it would not make it through the decade.
Borders, the other big American bookstore chain, ran out of road first. It filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2011 and liquidated its stores that summer, and the Borders name now survives only as a licensed brand.
Barnes & Noble looked like the next name on the list. Amazon took the price argument, then the selection argument, then the convenience argument, and for years the only bookstore news was another closing sign.
The 2026 answer is not the one the 2011 headlines set up. Barnes & Noble is open, it runs more stores than it did five years ago, and it is one of the few mall-era American retailers adding locations instead of shedding them. The last Blockbuster is a single store in Oregon. Barnes & Noble has hundreds.
How many bookstores does Barnes & Noble run now?
More than 720 across the United States. Yahoo Finance reported the chain passing that mark in 2026, after a store count that had fallen below 600 as recently as 2023, according to TheStreet.
The target for 2026, announced in December 2025, is 60 new stores. Leases were confirmed in nine states plus the District of Columbia: California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington state, along with Washington, DC.
"Barnes & Noble is enjoying a period of tremendous growth as the strategy to hand control of each bookstore to its local booksellers has proven so successful," the company said in the statement to Fox Business in December 2025 that announced those openings.
Fox Business made the contrast explicit in the same report: the openings follow more than 15 years of declining store numbers. For a reader checking whether the branch they remember is still trading, the short version is that Barnes & Noble is opening bookstores rather than closing them for the first time in a generation.
Is Barnes & Noble closing stores in 2026?
A handful, yes, and the reason is usually the lease rather than the market.
TheStreet counted six Barnes & Noble closures in 2026: Nanuet, New York; Pembroke Pines, Florida; Waterbury, Connecticut; San Bruno, California; Portland, Oregon; and Redwood City, California, which traded for 33 years and shut on September 16, 2026 after its landlord declined to renew.
The Redwood City store told customers the closing was "forced by the end to our lease and the landlord offering no option to continue," in a notice quoted by TheStreet in 2026.
That is the pattern across the six. Nearly every one traces to an expiring lease or a mall being redeveloped rather than a decision to leave a market, and the chain has gone looking for replacement space in the same towns. Set against 60 planned openings, six closures do not read as retreat. They do mean the answer to whether a specific branch is still open depends on the branch, and a mall location whose lease is up is the one most likely to go.
Who owns Barnes & Noble today?
Elliott Investment Management, the activist investment firm, which bought the bookseller in 2019 for about $683 million.
Elliott already owned Waterstones, the largest bookstore chain in the United Kingdom, bought in 2018. Putting the two chains under one owner also put them under one bookseller: James Daunt, who ran Waterstones, took the chief executive job at Barnes & Noble as well and still holds both.
Ownership matters more than usual in this story. An investment firm buying a fading retailer is normally the opening scene of a liquidation, the way it went at Kmart and Sears. Elliott kept the stores and changed how they were run instead, and seven years later it is the reason there are more Barnes & Noble bookstores rather than fewer.
What James Daunt changed inside the stores
Daunt's repair job was not an app or a loyalty scheme. It was taking buying decisions away from head office and handing them to the people standing in the shop.
Under the old system, publishers paid for placement and a central team decided what every store in the country piled up by the front door. Under Daunt, individual stores pick much of what they stock and how it is displayed, which is why two Barnes & Noble branches in the same state no longer look identical. Store managers also renovated floor plans and leaned harder into toys and games alongside the books.
"Most of them begin to run much better stores, and that becomes an increasingly virtuous upward cycle of improvement," Daunt told Axios in 2026, describing what happens when store teams are left to use their own judgment.
Axios reported in July 2026 that Barnes & Noble and independent booksellers had both pulled off a turnaround, opening stores and reporting higher sales. That is the part a website cannot copy. Amazon still sells more books than anyone, and Amazon survived the dot-com crash partly by selling them cheaper than any store could. What it never built was somewhere to stand.
Will Barnes & Noble go public in 2026?
Possibly, and if it happens the owner on the share register changes.
Bloomberg reported on May 7, 2026 that Elliott had lined up Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to run a London listing of Barnes & Noble together with Waterstones. A listing on those terms could value the combined bookseller at more than three billion pounds, or roughly four billion dollars.
The timing is tied to the accounts. The group's financial year ends in April, which makes any offering unlikely before the second half of 2026 at the earliest, and London is understood to be the preferred venue over New York.
For a customer, an initial public offering would change almost nothing in the store. For the chain it would mark the end of the rescue phase: a bookseller bought out of trouble for about $683 million in 2019, floated seven years later at several times that, with the same chief executive in charge of the shelves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Barnes & Noble going out of business?
No. Barnes & Noble is not going out of business in 2026. The chain runs more than 720 bookstores in the United States, has a target of 60 new stores for the year, and closed six in the same period, having fallen below 600 stores as recently as 2023.
How many Barnes & Noble stores are left in 2026?
More than 720 across the United States in 2026, up from fewer than 600 in 2023. Barnes & Noble confirmed 2026 leases in nine states and Washington, DC, among them California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Washington state.
Who owns Barnes & Noble now?
Elliott Investment Management has owned Barnes & Noble since 2019, when it paid about $683 million for the chain. Elliott also owns the British chain Waterstones, James Daunt has run both booksellers since the takeover, and Elliott lined up banks in May 2026 for a London listing of the two.