Independent booksellers see growth in numbers, diversity
NEW YORK — Laura Romani, a Chicago-area resident with a background in education and library science, had been thinking of a new career.
“I was at home a couple of years ago reflecting on all the experience I gained and how I wanted to contribute to the Latino community, while also allowing myself to be on my own and make use of my love for books and passion for multilingualism,” she says.
The solution: Start a bookstore. With help from a local grant and stimulus checks that she and her husband received during the pandemic, Romani launched Los Amigos Books, initially as an online store last year and now with a small physical outlet with a bright blue front in Berwyn, Illinois. It focuses on children’s stories in English and Spanish.
Stores like Romani’s helped contribute to a year of solid growth and greater diversity for the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent bookstore owners.
CEO Allison Hill said the association has 2,010 members, at 2,547 locations, an increase of more than 300 since spring 2021. It’s the highest ABA total in years, even though the association in 2020 tightened its rules and permitted only stores that “primarily sell books” (over 50 percent of inventory). The ABA no longer counts sellers whose memberships are inactive.
Hill attributes some of the rise to owners who delayed renewing their memberships early in 2021, reflecting uncertainty about the pandemic’s impact. But a substantial number of additions, well over 100, are stores that have opened over the past year, dozens of them owned by people from a wider variety of racial and
ethnic groups. Those stores range from Libelula Books & Co. in San Diego to Yu and Me Books in New York City’s Chinatown, from Modern Tribe Bookshop in Killeen, Texas, to Socialight Society in Lansing, Michigan.
The ABA has long been predominantly white, with board president Jamie Fiocco acknowledging in June 2020 — after George Floyd’s murder — that the association had not done enough to “break down barriers to membership and service for Black, Indigenous and people of color.” Hill cited numerous recent initiatives, including the expansion of its diversity committee, diversifying its board, increased outreach and — for a time — the waiving of membership fees.
In Ossining, New York, Amy Hall is a vice president at Eileen Fisher who says her work in fashion inspired her to open Hudson Valley Books for Humanity. She had been looking through her bookshelves and began thinking about how sustainability in clothing could apply to what she reads. She decided to start a store that would offer mostly used books, and otherwise reflect the economic and ethnic diversity of Ossining.
After initial worries that the pandemic would devastate book sales, publishers
have recorded strong profits in the past two years and independent sellers have endured. Hill and others had feared that hundreds of member stores might close in 2020. Instead, around 80 shut down, and only 41 went out of business in 2021.
Independent bookselling is a resilient business, but rarely secure. It has for decades been a story of confronting obstacles — whether the rise of Barnes & Noble “superstores” in the 1990s that helped drive thousands of ABA members out of business, the growing power of Amazon.com, or such recent issues as supply chain delays and inflation.
Sonyah Spencer of the Urban Reader Bookstore in Charlotte, North Carolina, a store focusing on African American books, says higher costs, notably for rent and shipping, have made her struggle to break even. At the Changing Hands Bookstores in Arizona, buyer Miranda Myers has noticed “price increases happening more and more lately.”
At the same time, according to Changing Hands owner Gayle Shanks, sales “are up, way up. We had the best first quarter we’ve ever had in the store’s history and this second quarter is also tracking way up. People seem to be reading more than ever.”