It’s not every day you hear of a retailer expanding, but Waterstones is bucking the trend. The bookseller has announced plans to keep opening around ten new shops a year, thanks in large part to a surge of younger adults returning to reading. Sales rose by five percent last year, according to a report in The Guardian, and for the first time in a while the chain is talking about growth, not survival.
A new generation of readers is behind the surge.
What’s behind this revival is not just nostalgia for hardbacks and paperbacks. A wave of younger readers in their twenties and thirties have made books fashionable again. BookTok on TikTok has played its part in turning titles like Colleen Hoover’s romances and fantasy sagas into runaway bestsellers, but the deeper shift is that reading has become a habit for people who might once have defaulted to streaming or gaming.
Industry data backs it up. The Publishers Association reported that fiction sales grew by 12.2% last year, and audiobooks rose by 31%, hitting a record £268 million. Romance and fantasy, in particular, are booming, and Waterstones’ staff say the same genres dominate their tables. Once people start buying a few paperbacks, they keep coming back, and Daunt himself has said that readers simply “buy more.” That steady repeat business is what’s driving the chain’s confidence to keep cutting ribbons on new shops.
It wasn’t so long ago that Waterstones was seen as a fading relic of the high street, closing stores and struggling against Amazon. But under James Daunt’s leadership, the chain reinvented itself by handing more control back to local booksellers. Staff can choose what to promote, tables reflect local taste rather than centralised buying lists, and shops have been redesigned to feel warm and welcoming rather than sterile.
The results have been striking. Instead of being functional warehouses for books, Waterstones shops now invite people to linger, browse, and talk to staff. Many branches include cafés and cosy corners where customers can spend an hour with a coffee and a book. Daunt’s philosophy is that if you create an enjoyable place to buy books, people will return often, and sales figures suggest he’s right.
That’s also why the chain is so keen to expand into new spaces. Opening branches inside John Lewis and Next means it can tap into heavy foot traffic, while flagship shops like the one on Oxford Street show there’s still demand for bookshops in prime retail spots. Upcoming stores in Cheadle, Bluewater, and new branches in Scotland and Northern Ireland suggest Waterstones is as interested in serving local communities as it is in grabbing prestige locations.
This is a cultural shift that matters.
The resurgence of physical bookshops in Britain mirrors a wider story abroad. In the United States, Barnes & Noble, also led by Daunt, plans to open 60 stores a year. The turnaround strategy is similar: let managers run their shops, treat bookselling as a craft, and make the space feel worth visiting. The fact that it’s working on both sides of the Atlantic suggests the appetite for real-world browsing is stronger than many assumed.
But in the UK, this trend carries a particular weight. Libraries have been under pressure for more than a decade, and many towns have lost long-standing independents. A thriving Waterstones doesn’t replace a library, but it does mean that more communities have a physical place to buy and discover books. That helps new authors find audiences, supports local literary events, and ensures younger readers can have that formative experience of walking into a shop and finding something unexpected.
It’s also a reminder that reading habits are not set in stone. A decade ago, the narrative was that print was doomed, screens would win, and bookshops were finished. Now, fiction is the fastest-growing part of the market, audiobooks are bigger than ever, and physical shops are once again central to the trade. For many younger readers, mixing formats is the norm—buying a paperback for home, streaming an audiobook for the commute—and that flexibility makes the overall ecosystem stronger.
It will affect more than just the high street.
The renaissance of Waterstones points to something bigger than retail. For a generation that grew up online, reading offers a slower, more absorbing form of entertainment. A paperback doesn’t ping with notifications, it doesn’t demand multitasking, and it gives people a way to step back from the churn of digital life. That makes bookshops part of a cultural counterbalance, and the fact that they’re thriving shows that many people are craving that kind of pause.
Waterstones’ revival also ensures the UK book trade remains resilient. A strong high street presence gives publishers confidence to back new voices, knowing there are places to sell them. It creates jobs for booksellers who are passionate about what they do. And it shows that, even in an economy where many retailers are retreating, books still hold enough magic to pull people through the door.
For now, at least, Britain’s biggest bookseller has found itself on the right side of history. Instead of quietly shrinking, Waterstones is growing, and it’s doing so on the back of young adults who’ve fallen back in love with books.