Why do independent and local bookstores still matter?

In the “Era of Amazon”, online retail, and e-books, why do independent and local bookstores still matter and how they can win your attention?

In countries like Brazil, England, and the United States, recent initiatives are showing the resilient power of independent bookstores and the increasing interest by the public for second-hand books. Small and local businesses, despite the serious difficulties brought by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, are finding a way of connecting with the public via promotions and social media campaigns. However, their path is getting harder everyday with the competition established by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon and its extremely aggressive prices and retail techniques, imposing an online, e-book and algorithm-based business model. In the spirit of the free market, any business running within the law has the right to exist, but indie bookstores, as this paper argues, must be more valued by the public who wants to buy a book in a more humane and richer way. Those stores must be remembered and protected as a relevant business model with an important role within their community, increasing the localism movement and improving the literary system. To fight against the omnipresence of Amazon, those businesses are approaching the public in two ways: by remembering the humanity of books and by offering them exclusive experiences and services at their stores. That strategy, as History and pop culture sharply exemplify, has been in recent years a powerful way to connect old and new readers, fans and writers, small businesses owners and their neighbours.

---

Imagine that situation: it is Sunday, 10pm. You have a college paper to finish, due to the day after tomorrow, but your research is weak and behind schedule. Suddenly, you find online a book, by a foreign publishing house, that can clearly be crucial for your bibliography. It is an important book, but impossible to find immediately in bookstores near you. Online, there are only two websites selling it. One offers a copy at a high price and asks for a week to deliver. The other - let’s call that website “Amazon” — can deliver the book in less than 24 hours. And the best detail: with free delivery and at a 25% discount. You are saved. Imagine, now, that possibility: in a sunny weekend, you walk at ease by your neighbourhood, maybe walking your dog, maybe holding hands with your beloved one. You decided to enter a small bookshop selling second-hand books, a place you’ve never noticed before, just by curiosity or to kill time before a movie session later afternoon. You browse the shelves, occasionally flipping the pages of one book or another, reading a cover here or there. Then, when you are about to leave, you glance at the name of your favourite author, a Nobel winner writer, already dead. You rush to see the book, an edition you’ve never seen before. Turning the pages, you find the author’s signature, with a dedicatory to someone, probably the previous owner of that copy. It’s a treasure, for sure. For some money, now you have that rare book at home, that unique piece full of history.

Those two situations reveal our different relationships with one of the most fascinating things in the world: books. They can save students from getting a bad grade. They can distract us during a twelve-hour flight. They can remind us of the importance of good storytelling. They can teach us something valuable, from Astronomy to friendship. They can carry History and Memory. However, as those situations show us, buying a book can mean the most rational and pragmatic act or the most romantic and emotional one. Standing between those two poles, we have currently two worlds colliding: the omnipresence of Amazon around the world and the resistance of the small and independent bookstores. Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth according to Forbes, with a fortune up to US$ 184 billion, provides practicality, agility, and a range of million choices. It provides fast delivery, lower prices, access to books, physical or digital, published thousands of kilometers away. Facing so many advantages, seems highly odd to choose to buy a book in another store or website. If you want to read a book, why not buy it as fast and as cheap as you can, right? The small business owner living in your neighbourhood begs to differ.

In the “Era of Amazon”, one of the world’s most popular and profitable e-commerces, why does your local bookstore still matter? That is the million dollar question that small shops are trying to answer in order to invite you to cross their porch and leave with a small bag in your hand. Their strategy, in general, consists of two approaches: to remind you of the “humanity of books”, and to give you, more than a book, an experience. This brief essay will support those two strategies and defend the importance of supporting small bookshops nowadays. While those local and small businesses try to survive and invent new ways of competing with Amazon, numbers show us this fight is a race against the clock. In the United States, according to the American Bookseller Association (ABA), at least one independent bookstore closes every day. With the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, that rate can be higher. While this happens, Amazon takes advantage of the online retail, since 75% of all books and e-books are bought online in 2020. According to the book audience firm Codex, Amazon alone accounts for more than half of those sales. For the rest of the market, indie bookstores have only 4% of the market share. In recent years, those stores slowly built up the market share, approaching 5%, but the pandemic dropped the number back to 4%. For those, the only good news is that e-books remain “in control”: during the 2010s, after Amazon introduced the e-reader Kindle in 2007, the industry predicted the ending of printed books in a few years. Today, as reported by Vox Media, e-books have a stable 20% of market share, with print editions having the rest 80%. A few years ago, specialists were wrongly predicting that those percentagens would be currently flipped.

Although ABA reported that, on average, every day an indie bookstores goes under, there is always some entrepreneur eager to open a new place: according to the association, between 2009 and 2018 the number of indie bookstores grew 49%. Despite that, the fragility of the local bookstores during the 2020’s pandemic sparked reactions. Earlier in October, as reported by TimeOut, dozens of small bookstores in New York protested against Amazon, in a campaign launched by the American Booksellers Association. With card boxes, the owners covered their stores with bold statements: “Don't let indie bookstores become a work of fiction”, “Buy books from people who want to sell books, not colonize the moon”, and “Books curated by real people, not a creepy algorithm” were among the provocative signs. The protest appealed to two core elements of the book business: to the “humanization of capitalism” and to the “humanity of books”.

For the first one: as in the food business, where in recent years some groups are defending the importance of buying your vegetables and other products from your local vendors, valorizing organic food and local families and bringing money and value to the community, instead of giving money to the big supermarket chains like Whole Foods (a brand owned by Jeff Bezos, by the way), the book sector is defending the same: to prefer small owners who love books and dedicate their lives to books, not the billionaire who sells books only “by accident”, because his ambition is about getting richer and richer, selling anything that can be sold. In that way, small bookstores are asking the public to be more conscious as consumers, to evaluate, if they can, other things other than price. Because Amazon sells millions of other products in dozens of categories other than books, the company can easily lower the prices of books and e-books in an unprecedented way, unthinkable for their competitors, to the point of losing money. It doesn’t matter if the “book branch” of Amazon closes the month in red: the company can easily compensate those losses with the profits of other branches, like clothes and electronics. If your goal is to buy a book for the smallest amount of money, rarely Amazon will be a worse choice than any other website. But, if you believe that capitalism can be more human and less “robotic”, the small bookstore can be a valid alternative.

To prove that, small businesses and small bookstores are investing in the concept of localism: to buy local. As Ryan L. Raffaelli, Ph.D, professor at Harvard Business School, points out in the article “Reinventing Retail: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores”, “Independent booksellers were some of the first to champion localism: the idea of supporting a community’s economic interests by shopping at neighborhood businesses. Doing so won customers back from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other corporate competitors by stressing a strong connection to local values. (...) When a consumer shops at an independent bookstore, they are reinforcing a set of beliefs that they have about themselves and their ability to contribute to the economic welfare of their local community". [1] Enters, then, the second point of the protest: the humanity of books.

If low-priced books easily available online can democratize education, the access to Literature and the habit of reading (someone who lives in a little town, in a rural area far away from a big city, with no local library or a bookstore, can easily buy books at Amazon, books that would be hard to find in another way), giving to Amazon a strong topic to the “pro column list”, small and local bookstores can provide products and services that bring books to life and expand the experience of plain consumerism. Expanding the frontiers of the mere business transaction of offer/demand and paying/receiving, those stores can also increase access to Literature, promote culture, education and the habit of reading and, ultimately, change lives. The first advantage of physical bookstores, selling new or old books: the capacity to surprise you. At Amazon, once the algorithm understands “who you are”, you will be in a bubble almost impossible to break through. With some clicks, you said to the computer that you prefer non-fiction than fiction, poetry than biographies, Spanish authors than American authors. Based on that, it will appear to you very specific suggestions of books to buy. You will see what Amazon thinks you will like to see. There is little space to be surprised or to be challenged, to leave your comfort zone. At a physical bookstore, even with a bestsellers section or a new releases section popping right at your face in the store entrance, the customer is free to discover things for himself and to be surprised. Browsing through the shelves, it is your chance to discover an author you have never heard about before, to find a title you have never known before. Art and Literature are, among many other things, about finding things you didn’t know you were searching for.

The second advantage of your local bookstore over Amazon: to be part of a collective, to put your citizenship in action. To do that, those businesses are investing in events like meetings with authors, discussion’s panels about books and other topics, and a variety of other gatherings. Walking to a bookstore around the corner, an avid reader passionated about books can meet with other avid readers, can meet his favourite author, can engage in debates, courses and roundtables. The simple act of being physically present in a local with strange people, being opened to a brief interaction or conversation, is a powerful form of exercise your humanity and your sense of society. In São Paulo, Brazil, the Mercearia São Pedro mixes the concepts of bar and bookstore to provide to the local community an exciting point of gathering, promoting evenings of book launches, poetry readings and pocket shows with local singers. In London, England, the Librería (in homage to Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges) attracts customers and tourists with an unique architecture and a space for little events. If Amazon is trapped in the digital world, those physical stores can invest in cafeterias, small auditoriums and other spaces to attract an audience.

The old bookstore as a place for life, for experience and encounters, inspires stories, real or fictional. The romantic and idealistic appeal of old bookstores and printed books instead of e-books and e-commerces can easily be perceived in pop culture, indicating the relevance of books and bookstores in society’s imagination. The 90s romantic comedy classic You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is a perfect example. In the movie, Ryan is Kathleen, owner of an independent bookstore called The Shop Around The Corner. Anonymously via AOL, she starts to correspond with Joe Fox (Hanks), whose family owns a big chain bookstore that threatens Kathleen's business. Other famous scenes in bookstores includes Before Sunset (2004), the second film of Richard Linklater’s trilogy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, where the couple reunites for a second time at the famous Shakespeare & Co. in Paris; and Notting Hill (1999), where a relationship develops after the famous actress Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) enters a bookstore owned by William Thacker (Hugh Grant). As these three examples show us, books and love are a powerful (and probable) combination. The newest perfect example is Dash & Lily, a Netflix limited series premiered November 2020: New York’s Strand Bookstore serves as scenery and motto for the actors Austin Abrams and Midori Francis fall in love days before Christmas.

But we don’t need to go to the movies to see the power of a small bookshop in action. In the history of Paris, we have the best example ever: Shakespeare and Company. Founded in 1919 by the American publisher Sylvia Beach (1887-1952), the small shop at 8 rue Dupuytren (and, later, at 12 rue de l'Odéon) attracted customers of the caliber of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Simone De Beauvoir and Ernest Hemingway and, for many years before the Nazi occupation of France closed the business, it served as a pivotal stop for those who loved Literature. At Beach’s bookstore, people could buy books or simply rent them for a week, or they could just read for a couple hours in a comfortable armchair. The store even served as a post-office during the war. But Beach was much more than a bookseller. Visionary, she was the first publisher at the time to believe in James Joyce’s colossal “Ulysses”, published in 1922 with her money. Without the help of a small business owner passionate about books, one of the greatest classics of all time could have never existed. [2]

Finally, the third advantage reminds us about how books are unique objects: although Amazon can sell second-hand books (any customer can create a seller profile at the website and offer an old book to sell), they focus on new products. Only in a local bookstore a person can discover the unique history of each book. In those places, it is not uncommon to find something hidden between the pages: an old movie ticket, a photograph, a handwritten note. Also, in those books you can find a signature, and address, a price tag: everything telling something about life from five or fifty years ago. In New York, Strand, the most famous bookstore in the city, dedicates special shelves only to sell books that are signed by their respective authors and, also, an entire floor dedicated to rare copies. If you are a fan of, for example, David Foster Wallace, you can buy, with enough money, an issue signed by him twenty years ago. In São Paulo, the Desculpe a Poeira, in Pinheiros neighbourhood, provides in a small garage a special selection of second-hand books with a dedicated and professional curatorship hard to find in any other store. Only in those places a rare or very old book is promptly available to your sight - and to your home shelf.

For those who love old bookstores, there is hope. During the Coronavirus quarantine in 2020, numbers from Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) have shown that in Brazil, as in June, retail sales in general rose 8% from May, but one segment saw an astronomical growth: the segment of books, newspapers and magazines rose 69,1%. Some other studies show that, despite the aggressive marketing campaigns of Amazon and other big chains, the interest for old books and independent bookstores are high. According to a 2017 study in Brazil by Confederação Nacional de Dirigentes Lojistas e pelo Serviço de Proteção ao Crédito, 76% of the interviewees think it is preferable to buy a second hand book instead of a new book. Also, the Brazilian website Estante Virtual, that has 2.600 independent bookstores registered, reported that, in 2018, they sold three million books and, comparing the last quarter of 2019 with the same period in 2018, sales rose 15%. In the United States, where American Booksellers Association counts 2.321 independent bookstores in the country, sales were up about 9% in 2018 from 2017.

Winds of hope during the Coronavirus pandemic also came from business initiatives that have shown, with dollars and pennies, the power of independent sellers and the interest of people for books from a more “humane” source. In the UK, in November 2020, as reported by many newspapers, such as The Guardian, the launch of the new website Bookshop gave to local customers an alternative to Amazon. The new e-commerce allows customers to browse through 150 independent book sellers (so far) across the UK in order to choose a local bookshop. In its first week, Bookshop received 20.000 orders, representing 415.000 pounds of sales in total. Almost at the same time, in Manhattan, Strand Bookstore got really concerned with its financial health, since the business had months of closed doors because of the quarantine. Facing the real risk of closing its doors, Nancy Bass Wyden, the owner of the family business, pleaded for help on social media and urged fans and loyal customers to order Strand books online. The result, as the newspapers happily reported, was overwhelming: an avalanche of 25.000 orders and 200.000 dollars in sales.

In a free society, with a free market model, any business, from a small one to a billionaire one, has the right to exist within the law and based in ethics practices. In the same way, any citizen has the right to choose what to buy and where to buy it. In those terms, nothing can be said against the existence of Amazon neither the decision of a person to spend a thousand reais or dollars in books at Amazon. At the end of the day, a low or middle-class person can choose to buy a book at Amazon because it’s cheaper and he or she needs to save money for another purchase - food, gas, clothes. Other people, with more free time and some money to spare, can choose to visit a local shop, only to drink a cup of coffee and browse unworriedly through the shelves in hope to be surprised. Make your own choice and be comfortable with that. But it is important that we remember that books aren’t like any other commodity or object. Yes, they are made in factories. Yes, they have code bars. But each one can also carry a history and the entrepreneurs involved with them can be cultural agents interested in more things than just “to make a profit”. Although books can be really practical, they are also full of humanity. In a world full of stress, rush, automatism and cold relations, it is valid to remember that we don’t need, all the time, to buy books robotically like we are buying new white socks or batteries for the remote control. To buy books can be an interesting experience, full of joy and pleasure, that connect us with other people, with our community, with our past and present. To give a small bookstore a chance is to value not only your local community and its businesses owners, but also Literature as a whole, contributing to maintaining a complex cultural system that connects book lovers, publishers, writers, and readers.

NOTES

1- RAFFAELLI, Ryan. “Reinventing Retail: The Novel Resurgence of Independent Bookstores.” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-068, January, 2020.

2 - BEACH, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company: Uma Livraria na Paris do Entre-Guerras. São Paulo: Casa da Palavra, 2009.

---

CITATION: DEARO, Guilherme. "Why do independent and local bookstores still matter?". São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, december 2020.