Tyler Kramer is turning 38, but he’s bouncing around the store like a little kid. His wife has given him the ultimate birthday gift: three minutes to race around the aisles of Barnes & Noble, filling his basket. He grabs a mix of classics, including Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, and more recent cult hits, such as Pierce Brown’s Dark Age and Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. A video of the bookshop sweep, which has almost half a million views on TikTok, captures what Kramer calls his “best birthday ever.”
The video is a window into the online buzz that’s helped Barnes & Noble Booksellers Inc., America’s largest brick-and-mortar bookstore, make an unlikely comeback. Thanks to a pandemic-era swarm to BookTok—the name TikTok’s book-loving community coined for itself—US readers are more quickly discovering titles and recommending them to friends and followers. That has offered Barnes & Noble, which reported seven straight years of falling sales before it became the target of a billionaire hedge fund owner in 2019, a chance to resurrect itself.
