A Barnes & Noble bookstore is slated to open in Turlock in May of 2026, filling a vacancy for city bibliophiles that has existed since Lightly Used Books closed its doors in March.

The new store will be located at 2693 Countryside Dr. — the former Forever 21 location — in the Monte Vista Crossing shopping center.

Turlock used to be home to a Borders bookstore, until that chain declared bankruptcy in 2011.

Barnes & Noble has a location in Modesto, and had one in Merced until 2024. Shortly before the pandemic, Barnes & Noble seemed destined for a fate similar to Borders, as online giant Amazon grew to dominate the bookselling business.

According to a report in Forbes magazine, Barnes & Noble reported a loss of $125 million on revenue of $3.7 billion for the 2018 fiscal year, and lost more than $1 billion in market value since 2014.

Elliott Advisors purchased the ailing company for nearly $700 million, and added it to a portfolio that included U.K.-based bookstore chain Waterstones.

The Barnes & Noble reins, according to Forbes, were handed to Waterstones CEO James Daunt, who nursed Barnes & Noble back to health and opened more than 60 new stores this year, with plans to open the same number in 2026.

“The reason Barnes & Noble has rebounded from a very difficult period in just a few years has to do with James Daunt,” Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics and Prose bookstores in Washington, D.C., told the Wall Street Journal. “He came with a philosophy of letting bookstores reflect their local communities.”

Rather than dictating what and how to sell, Daunt relies on the local team.

“It’s about how you take all of this huge number of books and arrange them and display them in a manner which really engages with your local community,” he said in an interview with PBS News. “The insight that gives me in terms of running lots of bookstores is leave it to the teams in each store. The vast majority of them will do it exceptionally well, and your stores will become better and busier, and the business will thrive.”

Bookstore sales in the U.S. declined 8 percent during the previous five years, from $8.6 billion in 2019 to $7.9 billion in 2024, according to the Census Bureau’s annual retail trade survey.

But there’s good news, too.

According to one recent survey, 65 percent prefer physical books, compared to 21 percent who favor e-books and 14 percent who opt for audiobooks. The survey also found that 70 percent of the youngest readers (ages 16-24) prefer physical books.

“If you buy Percival Everett’s ‘James’ from Amazon, it’s the same (book) I will sell you,” Daunt said. “But if you come into this store to buy it, you will have an experience. And when you walk out of the store with it in your bag, it will lift you. It’s the same book, but I promise you it’s a better book and the reading of it will be more pleasurable because you bought it in a bookstore.”