Barnes & Noble will open four new bookstores in the Chicago area by summertime, including a flagship location downtown on State Street, part of a national move to revive its brick-and-mortar retail presence.

The bookseller will open a store this summer in the former Old Navy outlet at 150 N. State St. Another Barnes & Noble store will open in early 2026 in Hyde Park at 1524 E. 55th St. The company also plans to relocate its store within Skokie’s Westfield Old Orchard Mall to a new two-level space, and build out by late spring a new Barnes & Noble inside the former Borders Books in Oak Park.

The rise of Amazon and other online sellers decimated bookstore chains across the U.S., but the pandemic gave many readers a new appreciation for gathering places and the kind of community they can’t get online, said Janine Flanigan, Barnes & Noble’s vice president for store design.

“There’s been a tremendous surge of interest in reading, especially among teens and young adults, and coming out of the pandemic, Barnes & Noble was one of the few places where people could come and gather,” Flanigan said. “Book lovers really like to have interactions, and come into our stores to spend time and browse the shelves.”

Barnes & Noble opened 31 new stores in 2023, and accelerated the pace over the next few years, she said. Sixty-one stores were opened in 2024, 58 in 2025, and 60 will open this year, including Chicagoland’s four new outlets. There are more than 600 Barnes & Noble bookstores in the U.S.

Flanigan said the company got back to its core business since James Daunt took over as CEO in 2019, putting less focus on games, puzzles and other miscellaneous items.

“We’re a bookseller first and foremost, and games are now a complement to the bookstore,” she said.

And instead of dictating from the central office which books to recommend, Barnes & Noble now lets local booksellers suggest books to their customers, giving the stores a more personal touch, Flanigan said.

“The stores are now making decisions about what’s right for their communities, and we’ve seen a tremendous boost in sales over the past two years,” Flanigan said.

That’s a good way to build customer loyalty, said Chris Irwin, a retail expert and senior vice president at Colliers, a commercial real estate firm.

“If you’re on the North Side you may see a book about the Cubs, and if you’re on the South Side you may see a book about the White Sox,” Irwin said. “It’s smart. Sometimes a corporate, cookie-cutter approach doesn’t work.”

Barnes & Noble has also become a lot more flexible about the size of its retail outlets. Instead of building standard 25,000-square-foot stores, the company adapts each to their community, Flanigan said. The downtown Chicago location in the former Old Navy, currently in the early stages of design, will span 30,000 square feet. The Hyde Park location will be a little more than 18,000 square feet. The Oak Park store will have about 20,000 square feet and Old Orchard about 22,000 square feet. The Hyde Park and Oak Park stores will also include a cafe.

A new Barnes & Noble can be tough on small neighborhood booksellers. Volumes Bookcafe, an independent bookstore in Wicker Park, said it’s closing in January after losing a significant chunk of business to Barnes & Noble, which opened in October 2024 in Wicker Park’s century-old Noel State Bank building.

Irwin said Barnes & Noble is the only large bookstore chain launching so many brick-and-mortar stores.

“There doesn’t seem to be anyone else in that space,” he said. “They’ve cornered the market.”

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