Highlights
America’s independent bookstores may look like the tattered, provincial shops of a bygone era—holding onto their existence by the slimmest thread. And booksellers may appear genial and absent-minded, like characters out of Dickens. But in reality, they’re the marketing geniuses of our time.
In August of last year Publishers Weekly reported, “Bookstore sales finished the first half of 2023 up 6.9% over the comparable period in 2022.” In fact, independent bookstore sales outpaced most other publishing industry metrics in 2023, growing faster than overall unit sales of print books. This is unprecedented.
Booksellers have bent the rules of the free market. For the first time in history, a significant chunk of the buying public are voluntarily paying almost double—and going out of their way—to buy exactly the same product they can get cheaper and often faster somewhere else. And it’s all due to that ABA message: “non-corporate, authentic, and socially responsible.”
What no one says is that the bargain works both ways. If book buyers must behave virtuously and tithe an additional $11 a book, then booksellers must uphold the community’s doctrines. They’re locked in the moral contract, too.
But books are different. They signal something about readers’ intelligence, identity, and closely held ideas. Books confer status—especially among the highly educated. The people who sell them know this and they used it to make their case.
“Most independent bookstores have succeeded because they’ve responded to the needs of their community,” says Jan Weissmiller, co-owner of Iowa City’s Prairie Lights since 2008. “If they’re in a part of the country where people are asking for a certain kind of book, that’s what they have on the shelf. Because they’re a business.”
But what I really want is a store where all the ideas are on display—the socialist, capitalist, monogamous, polyamorous, urban, rural, popular, and reviled—that also has the homely sacrosanct quality of one of Hemingway’s coffee-and-absinthe bars. With great music, please—and no puppets, or cheap pizza.
Where are you buying books?