San Diego is getting one of the more than 60 new stores Barnes & Noble plans to open in 2025.
The big box bookstore will open in a 15,000-square-foot space in La Jolla Village Square, a shopping mall anchored by a Ralphs, Trader Joe’s and the La Jolla AMC 12 movie theater. A representative for the company said the store will open in October.
A sign in the window said the store will be hiring. To learn about jobs, it says, “TEXT HIREME to BARNES (227-637)”
The shop is opening in a space on the mall’s eastern side, near World Market, Marshalls, Ross and the UC San Diego Blue Line station at Nobel Drive. The space was previously occupied by ULTA, a beauty store.
With this future store Barnes & Noble will fill a gap in its San Diego County market. It has two stores about 10 miles south of La Jolla, in Point Loma and Mission Valley, another 17 miles north, in Encinitas, and others farther north and inland. La Jolla has several other bookstores — including Warwick’s and D.G. Wills, both on Girard Avenue. For decades, book lovers also had access to Bookstar, a Barnes & Noble store in University City’s Costa Verde shopping center. That store closed in 2022.
In a recent press release, the company talked about its expansion plans.
“Barnes & Noble is enjoying a period of tremendous growth as the strategy to hand control of each bookstore to its local booksellers has proven so successful,” the company said. “The bookseller is experiencing strong sales in its existing stores and has been opening many new stores after more than 15 years of declining store numbers. In 2024, Barnes & Noble opened more new bookstores in a single year than it had in the whole decade from 2009 to 2019. The bookseller expects to open over 60 new bookstores in 2025.”
Barnes & Noble went public in 1993 and went private again in 2019, when it was acquired by a British subsidiary of an American fund management company.
