Barnes & Noble is expanding in metro Atlanta. What does that mean for indie bookstores?
Moments before Barnes & Noble’s new Edgewood location opened to the public this past Wednesday, hundreds of people stretched along the building and wrapped around nearly to the neighboring Kroger’s front door.
Four years after Barnes & Noble closed its original location in the Edgewood Retail District in southeast Atlanta, the bookstore reopened just feet away at the site of a former Office Depot.
Store manager LaNisha Bates, who started her career with the company at the original store, threw up her hands behind the thick red ribbon as she proclaimed, “Edgewood is back.” Atlanta author Tayari Jones, who came to sign her latest novel “Kin,” snipped the ribbon to a chorus of cheers, marking the return of the bookstore.
“This store is so important to this neighborhood. That’s why I’m really excited it’s coming back,” said Al Cotton, a former employee of the previous Edgewood store, who took time off of work to be at the opening.
Barnes & Noble is making a comeback. The chain, which popularized mega-bookstores through the 1990s but declined amid the rise of Amazon and digital reading, plans to open 60 stores across the U.S. this year.
In metro Atlanta, Barnes & Noble plans another new location in the Toco Hill neighborhood this September. The bookseller is relocating its store at The Forum in Peachtree Corners to a new location in the same shopping center this fall.
Barnes & Noble recently closed a store near Cumberland Mall in Cobb County after the building it leased was sold but plans to find a new location in the neighborhood, according to media reports.
The company also is scouting for more locations, added Janine Flanigan, vice president of store design for Barnes & Noble.
“Atlanta is a great market for us,” she said. “Any place where people want a bookstore, we love to be.”
But amid the chain’s expansion, independent bookstores near the new locations wonder what more competition means for them.
Frank Reiss, owner of A Cappella Books in Inman Park, less than a mile from the Edgewood Barnes & Noble, has been running his business since 1989. A Cappella Books survived lean times in the early 2000s, when Reiss said it felt like the bookstore wouldn’t last, as well as COVID-19’s unique set of challenges.
“I’ve been around for so long, and we’ve weathered a lot of this kind of thing, so I suspect we’ll be able to weather it again,” he said.
A plethora of indie bookstores
Metro Atlanta has seen an explosion of new indie bookstores, from Hapeville’s Impossible Moon Bookshop to Peoplestown’s Offbeat Books. Across the U.S. last year, 399 indie storefronts opened, up more than 60% from 2024, according to the American Booksellers Association.
The number of bookstores grows even as fewer Americans read for pleasure today, according to federal data. But print books remain the preferred format over e-books or audiobooks, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center, which found two-thirds of adults read all or part of at least one physical book over 12 months.
The emergence of social media communities such as BookTok and Bookstagram has helped fuel renewed interest in reading from younger generations. And genres such as romance and science fiction saw book sales rise in 2025, according to Publishers Weekly.
But even with the renewed interest in physical books, is there enough bookstore business to go around?
“DeKalb and Fulton, we have a rich indie bookstore scene, and we are not anti-chain,” said Rebekah Hagedorn, owner of Tall Tales Book Shop, which has operated in the Toco Hills Shopping Center for almost 47 years.
“I think every community needs to have some good bookstores. I’m not anti-Barnes & Noble. I just want them to open in, like, Douglasville,” she said.
Marlene Zeiler opened Tall Tales on the opposite side of the shopping center in the late ‘70s, and moved it to its current location in 1999. When she started itching for retirement in 2013, longtime employee Hagedorn took over and has been running it ever since.
The cozy store offers books across all genres and for all ages. Art and science posters hang on the walls above wooden shelves, and Hagedorn’s black cat, Christopher Marlowe, occasionally clocks in for a shift, she said.
Hagedorn learned that Barnes & Noble would be opening a new location next door in Toco Hills Promenade in the former Westside Market space from a reporter after the news broke in March. That shopping center has a different landlord.
Hagedorn said that while she wasn’t happy to hear that Barnes & Noble would be opening so close to Tall Tales, the bookstore has had plenty of visits and emails from customers reassuring her that they wouldn’t change their shopping habits, “which is very consoling.”
The Edgewood Barnes & Noble is located a little more than a mile from several other independent bookstores, including Bookish in East Atlanta, All the Tropes in Kirkwood and A Cappella Books.
Kendra Gayle Lee opened Bookish over six years ago with the goal of stocking books from authors “writing from the margins,” she said. Lee and her staff have built a curated bookstore and a community of readers.
In recent years, she said she’s seen the eastside of Atlanta become saturated with new bookstores, so many that she can’t keep count, but each has its own niche that allows it to thrive.
“We have proven that we can sustain ourselves, which is probably why Barnes & Noble is opening down the road from us. There are other neighborhoods in Atlanta that truly are underserved, and that is not where they are opening,” she said.
Flanigan said she believes the chain can co-exist with smaller bookstores.
“I think that when you are a book shopper, you are shopping every bookstore,” she said. “If there were seven bookstores on just one block area, I would visit every single one of those, and I promise you, I would find a gem.”
Like A Cappella Books, Tall Tales Book Shop has outlasted many seismic shifts in the bookselling industry, from the early rise of big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, to the e-commerce boom and Amazon. Despite all these challenges, Hagedorn and her team are preparing to celebrate 47 years in August.
Hagedorn thinks the bookstore’s customer service is part of what sets it apart and has kept patrons returning all these years. There’s also a benefit to having employees who have been in the industry for decades, Hagedorn said, as they can meet all their customers’ requests with a deep pool of knowledge and enthusiasm.
“We are not severely worried. We have faith in our customers,” Hagedorn said. “They’ve kept us going for 46 years.”
Barnes & Noble’s evolving strategy
Barnes & Noble’s expansion comes under the ownership of Elliott Investment Management, the hedge fund that acquired Barnes & Noble in 2019 and now is preparing for an initial public offering.
Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt has worked to remake the bookseller by giving local managers more control of how the stores look and perform, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Once known for sprawling cookie-cutter stores with dark wood shelves, Barnes & Noble now is embracing a different look and feel. Bookshelves are taller and a lighter color, creating nooks for people to wander around and peruse.
“It’s about that journey,” said Flanigan, who has worked for the retailer for 41 years. “What I love about our new stores is each store is a bit different.”
Flanigan said the new stores have more seating and more books on display. The Edgewood store’s entrance, for example, boasts a large display of “new and noteworthy” books, along with a “bookseller favorites” section.
The retailer is also embracing varying store sizes, as opposed to only the superstores of the past. The new Edgewood store, for example, is roughly 15,000 square feet, smaller than the prior location at the shopping center, according to data from commercial real estate firm Retail Specialists.
“I believe you will continue to see Barnes & Noble in Atlanta fine-tuning store locations that create the highest sales and reflect their new smaller store footprint,” said Bill Read, executive vice president for Retail Specialists.
Read added that bookstores are beneficial for shopping centers because they bring in educated shoppers who tend to linger and have higher incomes.
Xola and Justice Murphy and their mom, Zuri Tau, said they screamed when they drove past the new Edgewood Barnes & Noble sign. Before it closed, the previous location had been a gathering place for them, where Tau would bring her daughters to play with toys while she and the other moms caught up.
In Barnes & Noble’s absence, they’ve frequented the smaller bookstores in the area.
“We’re readers, we always have been, so we are not going to stop supporting our local shops, because they have unique things to offer,” Tau said. “I think what can be said about a larger institution is just that it offers a wider actual physical space to gather, so you can just fit more people in here.”