This is not specific to publishing. The diagram tells the story: it's consolidation. Consolidation is bad. Giant companies are bad. In publishing as in other domains.
I hope that's not a national trend, but I suspect it is.
On top of that, Barnes & Noble is closing their larger locations, and replacing them with tiny ones that simply aren't compelling if you're looking for something specific.
Big cities I'm sure still have some, they have enough population to support them even if most people don't patronize them.
I see a fair number of them, scattered around, not even in ultra-populated areas, but the last 3 or 4 times I've stopped in to try and buy things for e.g. holiday gifts, they've had none of the things I was looking for in stock, and they always seem empty.
The publishers have been saying that their ability to promote books has drastically reduced with the internet, along with changes in reading and information habits.
It seems like a book needs a far bigger push today to rise above the noise of the internet (and people's over-abundance of content to consume), and this unfortunately meant that small publishers struggled unless they "joined together" to make a bigger push.
There's extremely small (self published) books and extremely large hits, but the middle is increasingly less viable, it seems. Similar to films.
> When Random House was a tiny independent company, it could make a tidy profit by publishing books that sold just ten thousand copies. But when you’re part of a billion dollar corporation, those books don’t move the needle—you need something bigger and splashier.
What? There's no rule that every item sold by a megacorp has to "move the needle." If I order some unscented shampoo from Amazon that doesn't move the needle for Bezos, and neither do all the orders for that particular brand put together.