It matters where you shop for books
Book sales are rising, but bookstores are struggling
By John Warner
Two striking statistics recently reported by Publishers Weekly:
Print book sales rose 8.2% in 2020 versus 2019, according to NPD BookScan.
Bookstore sales fell 28.3% in 2020 versus 2019, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The year-to-year increase in book sales was the largest since 2010, and was led by demand for books to keep children occupied during the period of remote schooling. Juvenile nonfiction was up by 23%, youngadult nonfiction by 38%. But adult books were up as well. By every measure, more books were sold in 2020 than in 2019.
Those gains aren’t reflected in bookstore sales, though, as pandemic-related closures and restrictions kept us away. The worst months for bookstores were April and May, the leading edge of the lockdowns, but even as restrictions loosened, sales remained 20% or so below previous year levels.
“Enough with the numbers,” you might be saying. “What does this have to do with me, the average book reader?”
I want to suggest that books are not merely a consumer product. Instead,
I’d like us to consider books as part of a larger ecosystem, which includes writers, publishers, booksellers and readers, and that good books depend on all parts of the ecosystem being healthy. As such, we cannot be indifferent about where we buy them.
Bookstores are a key component in making sure there is an interesting variety of books that connects with readers of differing stripes. If we lose bookstores, we will lose the places where word-ofmouth hits are born. We will lose the places where we may discover something we’d never heard of, simply because we brush past it on a table. We will lose one of the important congregating places where people who value books come together in fellowship. We will lose the place we might stop in after brunch on a beautiful afternoon when we need to walk off a meal and aren’t ready to go home yet.
We will lose booksellers, the people who tend to book system the same way a gardener works the greenhouse. An analogy:
When I was a kid, there were maybe three kinds of apples — red, yellow and green — and none of them tasted all that good unless you put them in a pie. Call those red and golden apples “delicious” all you want, but you weren’t fooling anybody. We ate them anyway, because you gotta eat apples, but now we have Honeycrisp and Pink Lady and Ambrosia and Gala and another dozen varieties readily available to choose from. People realized that all these varieties that had been around forever, but had been sidelined because those red, yellow and green apples were easy to grow and ship — not because they actually tasted good.
Right now, with publishing and books, we could be at peak variety. The somewhat worrisome consolidation in corporate publishing is being offset with a greater thirst for diverse voices and books, not to mention the continuing growth of scrappy independent publishers.
But if we narrow the channels through which books are sold, we will also narrow the kinds and varieties of books that will be sold. Books will still sell, because just like apples, you have to have books, but we will be missing something if we lose that variety.
It is fantastic news that book sales have weathered the pandemic — better news than we could have hoped for — but to revivify the ecosystem as a whole will require us to examine our patterns of purchase. We need to make intentional choices about where we shop to seed the return of bookstores.
If we do, we could be looking at a post-pandemic status quo superior to what came before.
As regular readers know, I try not to gravitate towards books that I think are particularly well known (readers can find those for themselves), but in this case, a very popular book,
by Gail Honeyman, is the right call.
Marie Benedict
Alam
For Joanne, I’m recommending another book with a high level of awareness, because I just finished it and it floored me. If anyone was hesitant about reading it, please don’t be; it’s amazing:
by Kazuo Ishiguro.