#15 Waterstones CEO: I Disdain AI Written Books, But Might Sell Them If Labelled

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It shows who you are before you even walk in the room. Explore what the Charter Holder advantage looks like at cfainstitute.org. Hello, welcome to the latest episode of Big Boss Interview. Now, today we have one of the stalwarts of the High Street. Somebody who's seen many a Christmas time through at various bookstores around the country. Now leads one of the biggest. Felicity Hanna has been speaking to him. Bliss, hello, who have we got today? Sean, I've been speaking to James Dant, who's the CEO of WaterSense and not just WaterSense, but also Barnes & Noble over in the US, which is owned by the same parent company. He's a really interesting bookseller because he just lives, thinks, breathes, dreams, books. He launched his own series of bookstores in the 90s. He was then headhunted to come and take over WaterSense when it was really struggling in 2011. When it was closing stores, it was seeing its profits absolutely plunge. He came in and he turned all that around. So it's fascinating to hear not just what he thinks of bookselling today and the High Street today, but his optimism for the future because it was a really optimistic chat. I think that's what absolutely stood out for me. You sort of expect a lot of retailers to come on and talk about the struggles. He was just very, very upbeat. He was upbeat about the budget. He was upbeat about books kind of holding their own. We talked through a lot of different areas, including AI and the risk of perhaps, AI created books being pushed out to the audience. We talked about Romanticie and how a lot of the audience now, they want their books a bit more dragony in it. A little bit more spicy is how he phrased it. And this is a particularly good business to talk to in the lead up to Christmas because these Christmas buying months are absolutely key to almost every bookseller. In fact, James Dant was saying that in the past 100% of profits have been made in that Christmas period. He said that that's come down a bit now that the business is able to wash its face. He said a bit more throughout the year, but Christmas is still clearly so essential for retailers of books. It's when so many of us actually think to go out and buy a physical copy. Sounds great while let's hear a bit more from James Dant, the chief executive of Waterstone. Well, I suppose I'll start by saying, hello, James Dant, CEO of Waterstone since 2011. Also now, CEO of Barnes and Noble, the American Books or Chain owned by the same parent company. You have a lot of books and different markets to consider. A lot of bookshops, which is happily or all doing different things in their different ways, but yes. How different are they? How different are the American and UK markets? Far more difference within the markets and between them. A shop in Hampstead is very different to one in Middlesbrough, a shopping, New York City is very different to one in Flint, Michigan. New York and London, quite similar. So you can't make any big generalizations about the difference in the two countries audiences? No, but overall we read the same books. We speak the same language, though, occasionally one might question that. Okay, well, we're in December. Christmas shopping is go. How significant is that to you? Traditionally, it's when booksellers make all of their money. And they, you know, hopefully, they sort of just about break even through 11 months of the year. And then Christmas comes along reliably every year. And then we make a bit of money. And that keeps us going for the following year. So how much can you put a number on it? How big a bulk of the profits that you make comes in these Christmas shopping months? Traditionally, it's been 100%. Nowadays, it's a bit less than that. We wash our face during the rest of the year, so it may be 70%. But we're still highly seasonal. And that's simply because costs in shops are fixed predominantly. And we just about cover those for 11 months of the year. And then that fixed cost is a smaller proportion during December when we do really well. So that's very interesting, then. You're so reliant on consumers feeling like they can get out and shop at this time of year. And we've heard that, you know, there's shaky consumer confidence, retail sales fell slightly in October. What did you see? Well, it's my 36th Christmas I'm that old. And 36 times in a row Christmas day has been on the 25th. And people have bought lots and lots of books and wrapped them up under the Christmas tree and otherwise given them away. And we've always had a good Christmas. I think in a way, I'd see it the other way that being so seasonal has been is a huge sort of boon to the business. You know Christmas is going to come along and it does. And how does the Christmas so far, the Christmas shopping so far, your footfall compare to say five years ago? We've been having a very, very good time as booksellers. I ain't generally not just in, you know, Kingdom of the United States, but sort of globally since the pandemic. And we saw a huge rebound in the shops. And once they reopened, a lot of people sort of enjoying them. And that simply hasn't gone away. And I think there was an expectation it would, but it hasn't. And 2025 has been a ferviless year for us. Because some retailers I've spoken to have said that consumers were kind of holding back. They're a bit anxious about the budget. The budget was quite late. That kind of stopped people shopping as much. Did you not see that? I don't think we ever really have. Booksellers have traditionally done very well in recessions. But I don't think it's that they've done well. It's just they haven't stopped doing whatever they were doing before. The recession and therefore relative to everyone else they seem to be doing. Well, people read books. They're not expensive compared to most other forms of entertainment. Certainly, you know, going to the cinema or the restaurant or the like. And obviously a book lasts a nice long time. So people perhaps in hard times sort of trade down. As we see it, sales just sort of keep on pottering along. Dependent rather more on whether there are massive books around or not. You know, if if if JK Rowling's writing Harry Potter, we have a better time of it. These days Sarah J. Mass, a record Yarros type books. But generally the quality of publishing does impact us. And this year has been a really nice year for publishing. Is there a particular genre that flies off the shelves at Christmas? Everything goes at Christmas, which is sort of one of the joys. Books are read by the very youngest of people. You can give a book to a baby all the way to the oldest and oldest of citizens. So no, books are, you know, the universal present. And what we do see is during the year that there are sort of particular trends that take off. And as I said, sort of romanticy is the one that people tend to focus on at the moment. But generally it's at Christmas that all levels out. Everyone books are everybody. Some people can be a little bit, is snobbish the word about romanticy? But that's clearly been a significant chunk of your sales this year. I think we have over the years always had books that everybody likes reading. And, you know, it was romance a little while ago. Colleen Hoover and the like. And obviously, most famous Harry Potter. But there's been 50 Shades of Grey. It's been this that and the other. And yes, of course, you know, the literati will stick their noses in the air. But it's all good fun. And we enjoy it as booksellers. And I think also if you are reading anything really, it leads to other books. And what we're seeing at the moment, what's so exciting about it is young people reading. And, you know, they are our customers of the future. Turns out all you need really is more dragons in books than. Indeed, dragons and increasingly I'm told a certain amount of spice attached to the dragon. Okay, well, you're still digesting the budget. I'm sure let's talk about it. What did what Rachel Reeves announced mean for you? Well, I seem to be about the only person who is sympathetic to the situation that she's in. I think, you know, for myself certainty is helpful and perhaps a little less sort of dithering around and wondering whether they're going to do this that or the other. But clearly taxes have to go up if all public spending has to come down or a combination of both. And it seems we're heading, as always, seen most sensible to a combination of both. But we've, over the last couple of years, had a very nice time of it and have found most of what has been enacted, you know, reasonably sensible from our perspective. In the narrow sensors of retailer, there were changes particularly to the business rates which impact shops, which was very helpful and something incidentally been calling on for decades, really. Long, long overdue where, you know, the taxation on high street shops has been disproportionate and very damaging, I think, to the importance of shops within communities. And now at last something has been done sort of more substantial than has been the case for many years. So this was a change to business rates in the budget to essentially allow smaller shops to pay less, larger shops to pay more? Were you a winner or a loser then from that? Well, we have both and therefore we benefited on one side and not on the other. But what's important for us is to be able to keep shops in as many places as possible. And we've been very steadfast in that. We haven't closed our shops in many of the less affluent parts of the United Kingdom. But we need neighbours and this will help our neighbours and we want vigorous high streets. So we're very pleased with this. So it won't make a change to sort of where you open stores or will it change some of your larger stores? Will they potentially struggle as a result or is it just all good news? It's, for us, I think it's all good news. It means that our shops in places that are struggling where there's a lot of vacancies and we have shops in, you know, all up and down the land and we're opening relatively modest number, maybe 10 a year otherwise. But our existing shops are more likely to have prosperous high streets with less vacancies and that's a really good thing. What about the rise in minimum and living wages? What's your wage bill looking like now? Well obviously it's gone up. Anyone who employs lots of people and we'll have seen that. My own view is that that is generally a good thing and if you've got a decent business you should be aspiring to raise your wages as far as possible. Again, I think the national insurance change didn't impact us greatly because we predominantly employ people who were above the thresholds, who were benefiting from the lower rate, which was taken away. So that didn't adversely impact us. And I think, you know, if you're employing people sensibly and well, you should probably welcome all of these changes. And you are very much a growing business. I mean, you're pursuing a really aggressive expansion strategy. Aren't you 10 stores a year? So you must have quite a lot of optimism at the moment. I think generally booksellers, as I say, we went through some very, very dark times sort of back in 2011, through to 15, also when e-books and the Kindle and Nuck and and Kobo were sort of apparently rampaging through and about to cause the demise of the physical book. Ever since then, sales have been, you know, once we sorted ourselves out, got ourselves really running night book shops. I think people started coming back into them and our sales went back up and that's continued pretty much in a number of contradictory, you know, other than when COVID forced us to close our stores. James, it's really interesting hearing you talk. Do you feel like a bit of an outlier on the high street because a lot of the retailers that we talk to, they're not sounding this optimistic, they're worried about their rates, they're worried about their staff bills, they're worried about football, you could almost be talking to me from a different street, a different country, a different universe. Perhaps it's, I've been doing the same thing for very, very long time, so my eye is seldom on today and it's as far as possible, always focused on the medium and long term. And I feel in the medium and long term, we are in a very, very good position. Even in the short term, yes, of course, you know, that the increase in the national living wage has been really extraordinary. But if you can manage your way through that, it's a hugely positive thing. And I feel that books and bookshops and reading and all the things that are attached to it remain absolutely, you know, rock solid. And that's a good thing for our business. What about changes to the Employment Rights Bill and the change to the probation period? So instead of day one rights against unfair dismissal, it's not going to be six months. I think that's a sensible thing. I think day one would have been really problematic. And that's on both sides of it. You know, people start work. We have to know whether the employee enjoys the job and and the employee needs to know whether they enjoy us. But a short probation period three months or so is a perfectly sensible one. And I think, you know, broadly speaking, you know, employees should have the protections that are available to them and they're perfectly sensible. Just your employees, then they're not just people who want retail jobs, are they? You recruit book enthusiasts. How important is that to your business? A bookshop is successful if the booksellers within it are enjoying themselves and communicating that in a passion is an overused word, but probably an appropriate one for most booksellers. We are vocational by nature. But of course, when you first come and work in a bookshop, it's probably a weekend job. It may be your first job. And you don't know whether it really suits you. You would probably like books and like reading, but bookselling goes way beyond that. But yes, our shops are run by our bookselling teams and it's entirely down to them as to whether the shop is a good one or a bad one. And we see shops go up and down according to how the mix of the team changes. And you've given your managers quite a lot of autonomy of the books that they order to sort of serve their local market? That's been the recipe of our success as not to or rather to exercise as little possible sort of central control over what they do. And to use the head office really in service of the shops, the head office is there to make life easier for them. Right checks. When it's necessary to make sure that things work, change the light bulbs for them, clean the carpet, replace this that and the other. Make sure the books that they order turn up on time, but not tell them where to put them, not tell them what to order. And certainly not tell them how to organise and arrange themselves. That's up to the team. And if they do that, well, they will be producing the best possible bookshop for the community in which they live. And that's why when you go into a wardestins, you'll find each really different to the other. But hopefully in harmony with the place in which you find it. One of the innovations that you're perhaps known for is the staff reviews, sort of pinned to the shelves so people can see what your team recommends. Does that make a difference to sales? Yes, of course. I mean, everything is around recommendation. In the old days pre-Amazon, people came into bookshops generally because they decided to buy a book and they wanted a particular title and they came in. And the booksellers job was to find that book on the shelf for them or point them in the broad direction of wherever it was. Once Amazon started fulfilling all of that demand, bookshops became places in which people came to discover books and to enjoy the whole process of buying and choosing and selecting. And then the bookseller is curation of the shop and recommendation of individual titles, the skill with which you understand from the customer what it is that they're looking for, what kind of book that they enjoy, and then putting those books in their hands, or, you know, through things like the recommend cards saying, you know, here's a book we think you should read. And this is why people appreciate that recommendation. If you're doing it well, people read better books and enjoy them more. Well, you've talked about perhaps some booksellers, some people working in this this retail sector beginning as weekend jobs and the first jobs. This wasn't your first job. You had a really interesting career. You left banking in fact to launch don't books in 1990. Why did you make that leap? A very, very, very, very long time ago. I took my first job at a university. Maybe as many students do not really having a clue what I wanted to do and taking something that seemed sort of conventional and sensible and found sort of quite quickly that that it wasn't quite working for me or at least wasn't working. Also for my then girlfriend. And I needed to find something else and if I wasn't going to work in an office and had a very good office job, then I needed to set up a business on my own. And I read a lot of love books and so set up a bookshop. And that was just the beginning. I mean, you've been credited with being the man who saved waterstones. It was in crisis when you were asked to run it. There were branch closures, collapsing profits. That was in 2011. By last year, your sales had reached 528 million pounds, up 17% on the previous year. I suppose the obvious question is what's your secret? But what's your strategy then? Because a lot of people would say that with digital books, online sellers like Amazon dominating the market, screen time competing for eyeballs, it's never actually been harder to sell books. I think it's remained true and it was my conviction that a good bookshop is something that people will truly appreciate and that if you're running a good bookshop, then customers and within the community are going to come in and you'll be busy and you'll have a really nice business. The secret was when I'd done that myself and therefore knew what the bookstore team needed to be able to run a good bookshop and then got out of the way. And we've had great success, great success of Watson's, great success now in the United States with Buns and Noble. It's sort of easy and people credit me with that. Actually, what I've done is not do anything, is get out of the way and let the book sellers themselves do good work, committed work, a hard work and skilled work in each of their stores and it's just getting out of the way and allowing the book sellers to do that. So that's your strategy, that's your kind of ambition for your stores. Are there any other retailers in any sectors that you look at what they're doing and you admire how they're approaching their business? I'm in huge admiration because it looks immensely difficult and far more complicated than anything that we do because they're striving for consistency and it's the very fact of consistency that you find in most retailers, no matter where you go, you will find exactly the same proposition pretty much and that's really operationally hugely complicated and requires massive direction. But we stripped all of that away and we don't try to do it and it turns out that we books at least if you're a little bit more chaotic and you allow just the inspiration of the particular location to take over, you do better. But I don't think that would be true if you were running a clothing shop and only did this or only did that. You need consistency if you're running Zara. You don't need the same consistency if you're running a book shop. Some of the kind of pleasurable chaos of other waterstances when you walk in particularly this time of year and you've got the shelves, yes, but you've also got those tables and the entrance stacks of books. Clearly your managers are kind of curating the Christmas best sellers. How important are those tables with kind of all the hard backs on? I think that's when the shop sets out its stall and that's when as a customer you come in, you immediately know what's sort of a book shop you're in. And again, if you walk into our Liverpool shop you'll find a very different set of books on the tables and if you walk into our Picadilly one, it's Picadilly London that is. And I think that's the skill of the book selling teams within that. But it's, you know, of course there will be commonalities within it and best sellers in one shop will be present in the other, but not necessarily in the same positions, not necessarily with the same juxtaposition of titles. And overall you'll get a very different proposition. So are publishers not kind of putting pressure on you to make sure that their authors are the ones that make those table stacks? Well back when we first started doing this and stopped taking money for placement of books, which is the traditional model and how it was always done before, they had a nervous breakdown. But that was back in 2011-12 and since then they've got used to the fact that actually we sell far more books this way. We took over Bonson Oble in the United States in 2019 and went through the same process and again they had a nervous breakdown. But if you're selling more books then publishers ultimately are happier. So did that feel like a gamble then to change, to move away from that pay for placement proposition? Not for me because I ran my own bookshop and the idea of somebody telling me what to put on my tables, what to put face out, what to have as a best seller seemed just impossibly stupid. So now as a bookseller running the place, not at all, financially it was complicated because we obviously weren't getting all the money and the inducements for placing particular books in particular positions. And then there was a simple mathematical thing where we're going to need to sell an awful lot more to make the whole thing work. Happily very quickly, we established that that was the case. Okay, so you don't like publishers telling you what to do. How would you feel about shareholders? Because you've said in the past that an IPO would be a logical step for Waterston's and Bonson Noble. So why? Well, we're always going to unfortunately have an owner and I think it obviously would be much easier if we didn't, but we do, whether it's a private owner or a public owner, it doesn't really make a huge amount of difference. I don't think to us other than we do have a private equity owner at the moment and the nature of private equity is that they sell you. And I think selling us into the public markets has always seemed the sensible thing to do at some point. Obviously it's going to be up to them to determine when we do that. Would it allow the business to grow faster or does it just feel like it's an inevitability? From my perspective, and I sort of speak with a certain amount of ignorance, it feels like an inevitability and probably better than being flipped to the next private equity person who would then IPO you. At some point, exits are achieved by private equity owners. It's what they do and typically the public markets and IPO is how they do it. Would you be consulted? Do you expect? I'm sure they'll sort of want us to carry on running the business sensibly and pragmatically future shareholders as much as present shareholders. So I'm sure they'll say, look, this is going to happen. And when it does, we'll just get on with it. Would you be surprised if it happened in 2026? I mean, there's quite a lot of talk about the reopening of the equity markets, strong presence of IPOs, quite a lot of chatter about whether it's the United States or the United Kingdom. Obviously London has been suffering as an IPO place at the end. But we are based out of London, but we have a huge American business. Barnes and Noble is much larger than water stands. There are actually reports, though, that you were among the companies that met Rachel Reeves recently to you yourself, in fact, to discuss kind of reviving London's listings market. What did you hear at that? There is an aspiration to get London moving again, obviously. We haven't used the Brexit word so far, but ever since Brexit, there have been considerable complexities for businesses across the piece, including ourselves, and obviously for the wider economy and in particular for the city of London. I'm sure anyone who lives in this country wants it to be as prosperous as possible, a strong city, a strong IPO market, a strong stock exchange is very much for the benefit of the nation, and we would hopefully all other things be equal, be supportive of that. It's interesting, you say, the Brexit word. Why did you phrase it like that? It almost feels like a euphemism? Because Brexit is still a highly emotional subject, and there are a large number of people who are hugely in favour of it, and obviously it was voted for. It has been pretty catastrophic in every single respect economically, and for business, and I think, for the nation as a whole, but that's not a particularly popular thing to say, but it, from our perspective, is true. What has it meant for waterstains? It's created a lot of complexity in how we trade. We have a large online business, actually, and a lot of that was in Europe. We have a European business, predominantly in Ireland, but also in the Netherlands, and Belgium, and it's made that more difficult. And we have employed, you know, a large number, particularly a seasonal employee, particularly in our distribution centres, and that has become more complicated. So it's added cost, complexity, and friction, generally, and how we trade. The UK publishing industry, though, still does export more books than any other country in the world? For sure. And also, typically, because it is an international publishing business, manages its rights out of London. So English language rights, or particularly books that originate in English, are then sold throughout the world out of the London offices, and that has been a cornerstone of the UK publishing industry. Okay, let's talk about one of the other challenges, then. You've seen, or you must have seen so many changes in books that, and since 1990, probably the latest change for a lot of businesses is AI. Are you using it at waterstains? We use it in limited, it helps our customer service operation become more efficient, it helps us in logistics and how you use, how you deploy your equipment, but we don't use it in the shops at all, and we spend quite a lot of time trying to keep AI-generated content out of our, sort of, certainly out of our shops, but also out of our online operation as well. Is that hard to do? You can use AI to identify AI, and that's helpful. But yes, there is a huge proliferation of content, AI-generated content, and most of it are not books that we should be selling. In fact, there was a report from the University of Cambridge just this month that shows just over half of published novelists in the UK, so that AI could end up entirely replacing their work as fiction writers, what do you think? I think it's possible that the sort of more generic end of publishing and writing that that's possible, I think, hopefully publishers will avoid it. We as booksellers would certainly naturally and instinctively disdain it, but at the sort of more literary end, which is predominantly what we sell, I don't see that being the case, and the there is a clear identification of readers with authors, and, indeed, booksellers play an important role in joining authors and readers, whether it's through literary festivals, all the events that we have hold within our shops, the exclusive editions, the signed editions, all of these things which have a personal connection between book effectively the author and the reader. That does require a real person. But we already see some really successful series of books, particularly children's books, for example, where there might be an author's name, but actually there's a team of writers just kind of churning this stuff out, and some of those publishers might think, well, AI could be cheaper and churn that out even faster. Indeed, and as a bookseller, we sell what publishers publish, but I can say that instinctively, that is something that we would require, and that we do feel that one of the most important things is that one is connecting authors and readers, and it's really important that authors earn livings, and we are responsible citizens within this wider sort of publishing industry of which we are a part, but we don't publish ourselves, so that is a discussion sort of held it in places other than the rooms I had. So to be clear, then, would you never intentionally sell AI books in your stores? We would never intentionally sell an AI-generated book that was disguising itself as being other than that. But would you consider selling it if it was clear what it was? Yeah, if it was clear what it was, you know, I think it's then it's up to the reader to decide whether they want to buy it or not. Do I think that our booksellers are likely to put those kind of books front and center? I would be surprised, but again, we don't dictate, and we don't dictate also around politics or any other particular issues around books. We try and cover everything and leave it up to the reader to decide whether the customer to decide what they want to buy. Could it lead to even more personalisation for the customer though? So if I tell AI that I love Twilight and War and Peace, and it gives me a book about Russian vampires? That's clearly possible. I think it's more likely to be happening in the digital world than it is in the physical world. Creating a book is to create a nice book, a nicely typeset, nicely printed, good designed cover binding and all the rest. There's an immense amount of work and effort that goes in that. And to be doing that for an AI generated piece of nonsense, I would be surprised. But, you know, who's to know, they're spending trillions and trillions on AI and maybe it's going to produce the next War and Peace. And if people want to read that book, AI generated or not, we will be selling it as long as it doesn't pretend to be something that it isn't. Okay, let's talk about what people are reading then because the UK Parliament's Education Committee has launched an inquiry into the decline of children reading for pleasure. It says that the percentage of children who enjoy reading is at its lowest in 20 years. If you give evidence to that committee, what would you say? I would continue to say what I've been saying for 35 years, which is I simply don't recognise this doom saying which has been a consistent feature of the 35 years that I've been book selling nearly 36. Do you think children are secretly secretly sneaking reading? I can't reconcile this notion that people aren't reading for pleasure, kids aren't reading for pleasure, with having shops full of kids looking at books, queuing up for books, creating these extraordinary moments of excitement. Some of it clearly supported by social media and book talk and TikTok and all the rest. With this notion that they're not interested in books, it just doesn't make sense to me. What we are seeing is our book, children's book sales continue to grow, continue to be strong, irrespective of the locations in which they are. It's not just the middle-class, leafy, affluent, highly educated communities that are buying books, it's everywhere across the country and that remains I think sort of rather thrilling. I think what is a real problem is that we've under-invested in our libraries and the role of the public library within communities has been diminished much to the disadvantage of people within those places and that was a really short-sighted, cost-cutting exercise, but I would guess that it's the nature of the survey which produces the answer, perhaps, that the survey people want. It's not something that I recognise as happening, at least as we see it in our shops. But if you're seeing book sales across the country and excited parents and excited kids, could it not just be that it's the middle-class, more affluent parents across the country buying those books for children? Do you worry that there are children on lower incomes who are perhaps struggling to get access to the kind of literature that might excite them? I think that is clearly an issue and if you under-invest in schools and you under-invest in libraries, you will be impacting the most disadvantaged within the communities. But that isn't to say that those parts of the community don't aspire to reading and aspire to detriment that comes from reading. And we see them in our shops. After you can come in and enjoy our shops and indeed spend a certain amount of time in our shops reading, you don't have to play anything. And if you come into a shop after school, you will find it full of kids sitting there, reading books, chatting, enjoying the shop. That seems a very positive thing. If they had a library to go to, they'd probably be borrowing the books from there as well. Is the agenda divide among adults? Do you see men or women read for pleasure more? Girls read more than boys. Women read more than men as a crew generalisation, but it changes and swaps than through stages of life. And generally speaking, yes, we almost certainly sell more books to women than we do to men, but it's a relatively small variance. You think men just need to embrace that spicy dragon content more? I think, you know, the men who just seem to go through phases when they aren't reading much, whether as boys or as, you know, as they're starting their careers or whenever, but they do come to books. And I think they like the spicy dragons just as much. We talked a bit about you, you know, sort of standing up, fighting back, competing with the big beast of Amazon, fighting back for physical books sold from bricks and mortar shops. In a way, though, for smaller independent booksellers, you're the big beast that they have to compete with. Do you think Waterstones makes it harder for those smaller sellers like your original smaller chain at Donut? Yes, because there is a Waterstones in a town, then somebody isn't going to be able to set up an independent or it's going to be more difficult for them to do so. But on the other hand, I think if Waterstones had gone bankrupt and it very, very nearly did, the loss of those 300 plus bookshops would have been pretty devastating and I don't think they would have been replaced by 300 sort of great independence or even 300, not so good independence. But we don't directly compete with independence, never have and never will. And I suppose Donut books are still going strong with people travel from all over the world to the Marriolibon shop. Yeah, I think if you're running a good bookshop in whether you're an independent or a Waterstones, you'll be doing fine. And I've got my own shops and they're small. I've got the one famous one, but I've got other ones that are just little shop shops, bookshops doing nice trade in small places and enjoying themselves. I suppose the charm of a historic bookshop is a big part of that. And going back to Waterstones, some of your buildings are quite historic buildings or they're older buildings, they're attractive buildings. That must come with an additional cost. It does. It's a blessing and a curse at the same time. They're wonderful buildings. They create atmosphere. They do generally benefit from lower rents because they're such difficult buildings. But on the other hand, they come with massive maintenance issues. So blessing and curse overall, I think it creates some really wonderful spaces from which we think in the round benefit. We've talked about Romanticity and how the joy that people can kind of take from those kind of books. A few newspapers recently have also pointed they to a sort of opposing trend. This trend of what's being called performative reading, people being accused of deliberately posing with high brow books in public. Is that a thing? One of the things that happened as we came out of COVID before the fantasy boom is we had the booming classics and everybody was reading Middle March and Jane Austen and buying nice editions, cloth band editions. And they were definitely reading them and continue to a considerable degree to do so. If you read Middle March, it's just a brilliant novel. And I don't think people just pick up a Middle March and sit there and sort of pose with it and say, or if they do, I hope that they do open it. And once you've started, you're not going to stop. So one of the great joys of recent years has been the booming classics. And you start reading Jane Austen and you're in for a real pleasure if you haven't had that. Have we got a funny relationship with people reading books in this country? There are people who like to stare and criticise people who read Ramam to see and then we're apparently also snaring, criticising people who are sitting reading Middle March in parks. And I think it's sort of always been part of and we touched on it before. Always being sort of part of this thing. It was ringing our hands and saying nobody's reading and it's where we're asked. But that was part of my childhood. I'm so old that there was a time when it was we were accused of having square eyes because we were watching Blue Peter and because we were watching Blue Peter and the BBC, we were never going to read a book again in our lives. And we just got a modern version of that going on at the moment. And meanwhile, children read a lot and young adults, in particular, read massively. And they communicate and they court through reading and the exchange of ideas. And you like this book and I like that book. And reading just seems to be on an app for upward trajectory, perhaps in tandem with more education and better education overall. A subject again over which people bring their hands and say it's just doom and gloom and never ending spiral. But it isn't never ending spiral. We have a wonderful generally free education system in this country that most people benefit from and come out reading something if not everything. James, what are you reading at the moment? I have just finished the Arondati Roy Mother Mary comes to me, which is completely fantastic. And finally, reading at the artist by Lucy's deed, which is something that Walson's booksellers have been completely gargareover ever since it came out at the beginning of the year. And which I'd avoided reading for some reason, not quite sure why. Anyway, I'm now halfway through and think how foolish it was for me not to read it earlier. You've talked about a lot of markets, a lot of bookshops. Do you read a lot of books? How many are you reading in a year? Well, I do, because I read professionally, I do a rather awful thing, which is start a lot of books and then not finish them. Typically, first novels, which I love, and I love the excitement of opening up a first novel and not knowing what's going to come of it. But if it isn't quite that good, I'll just move on to the next one because a lot of them are published. Hot tip for later on in the year is Trisha Finn's The Golden Boy, which is a first novel absolutely fantastic. And when you find those, particularly new voices, new authors, it's thrilling. I can't believe you start books and you don't finish them. You're the same as the rest of us. No, no, I'm far worse. James Dawnt, thank you so much for joining us on Big Boss Into You. Pleasure. Thank you. That was James Dawnt, the Chief Executive of Waterstones, speaking to Felicity Hanna. If you want to catch a few more of our Big Boss interview podcasts, please do subscribe on BBC Sounds. 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