I’ve written too many negative stories about digital media platforms in recent months. I’ve started to worry. Am I turning into Dr. Doom and Mr. Gloom?

In all fairness, my predictions have proven sadly accurate. After I served up these dismal forecasts for Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, and others, their share prices took a steep dive.

I’m not sure that’s a good thing—I’d like to see digital media improve and flourish. When they falter, we all pay a price. But each of these companies is now suffering for a good reason. Their dominance led to arrogance, and they decided to impose all sorts of heavy-handed policies on users.

But I finally have good news to share. I have a positive case study—and we can learn from it.

Here’s the surprise: This company has been a failure at digital media, and has succeeded by embracing the most antiquated technology of them all: the printed book.

That’s quite an achievement. So let’s look at the turnaround at Barnes & Noble.

At first glance, this makes no sense.

All the cool and up-to-date technologies are in financial trouble. Tesla share price has collapsed. Crypto is in decline. Netflix stock has dropped more than 50% in the last year. Facebook is in freefall. Even TikTok might be in trouble.

But Barnes & Noble is flourishing. After a long decline, the company is profitable and growing again—and last week announced plans to open 30 new stores. In some instances, they are taking over locations where Amazon tried (and failed) to operate bookstores.

Amazon seems invincible. So the idea that Barnes & Noble can succeed where its much larger competitor failed is hard to believe. But the turnaround at B&N is real. In many instances they have already re-opened in locations where they previously shut down.

Barnes & Noble is no tech startup, and is about as un-cool as retailers get. It’s like The Gap, but for books. The company was founded in 1886, and it flourished during the 20th century. But the digital age caught the company by surprise.

For a while, Barnes & Noble tried to imitate Amazon. It ramped up online sales, and introduced its own eBook reader (the Nook), but with little success.

Even after its leading bricks-and-mortar competitor Borders shut down in 2011, B&N still couldn’t find a winning strategy. By 2018 the company was in total collapse. Barnes & Noble lost $18 million that year, and fired 1,800 full time employees—in essence shifting almost all store operations to part time staff. Around that same time, the company fired its CEO due to sexual harassment claims.

Every indicator was miserable. Same-store sales were down. Online sales were down. The share price was down more than 80%.

And here’s what happened to its big digital initiative, the Nook eBook reader—a decline of more than 90%. I’m told that eBooks are a growing market, but you would never guess it from these figures.

Could anybody fix these problems?

Amazon had taken over the book retailing business, and had already killed Borders. B&N seemed destined to disappear as well. Everything it had done to match up with Amazon had failed, and now it was weaker than ever.

After all its bad moves, Barnes & Noble now was back where it started as a bookstore. But I’ll be blunt about it: B&N was a lousy bookstore. I gave up shopping there because it never had the book I wanted in stock. Instead it shifted a huge portion of its floorspace to peddling toys, greeting cards, calendars, and various chachkas.

Not many people were buying these items, as far as I could tell. Do people really go toy shopping at a bookstore? Toys R Us also filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and if they couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?

In the CEO’s own words, Barnes & Noble stores were ‘crucifyingly boring.’

The other B&N big initiative was cafes inside the store, but these were even less appealing than the bookstore. I drink a lot of coffee, but I’d need to be desperate for a caffeine fix before I’d buy a cup of java at B&N.

And in a bizarre strategic move, the company decided to launch freestanding restaurants under the name Barnes & Noble Kitchen—no books, just meals. But this was another disaster.

The company chairman Leonard Riggio eventually admitted, in September 2018, that running a restaurant is “a lot harder than you think it is….The bottom line is awful.”

In other words, food at B&N was just like the books, except books don’t stink when they get old. But in this case, everything the brand stood for was looking stale.

It’s amazing how much difference a new