BUMP FOR BOOKSTORES
Independent shops staying afloat,
NEW YORK— With retail stores shutting down at the fastest pace since the crash of 2008, the head of the American Booksellers Association is grateful to see business holding steady.
After seven straight years of growth, core membership in the independent sellers’ trade group has dropped slightly since May 2016, from 1,775 to 1,757. At the same time, the number of actual locations rose from 2,311 to 2,321, reflecting a trend of owners opening additional stores.
The association’s CEO, Oren Teicher, says sales from reporting outlets are up about 2.5 per cent in the first four months of 2017 over the same time period last year. Sales increased 5 per cent from 2015 to 2016.
“We’re pleased that the sales and presence of independent stores continues to grow at a time when thousands of other stores are closing,” he told The Associated Press during a recent interview.
During the association’s prolonged decline, when the rise of superstores and e-books helped cut membership from about 5,000 in the 1980s to just 1,401 in 2008, the market looked so dire that some profitable stores closed because the owner wanted to retire and no buyer could be found.
In recent years, independent stores have been helped by a variety of factors, from the fall of Borders and the struggles of Barnes & Noble to the levelling off of e-book sales.
Concerns do remain for independent sellers as they prepare to join thousands of publishers, authors, agents and librarians at the industry’s annual national convention, BookExpo, which begins Wednesday at New York’s Jacob Javits Center.
Closed stores of any kind can reduce foot traffic in a shopping district and hurt booksellers among others. And one company expanding on the ground is the online giant Amazon.com, which has been cited as a factor in closings for everyone from J.C. Penney to American Apparel.
Amazon just opened its first bookstore in Manhattan and seventh overall.
One outlet is within three kilometres of Third Place Books in Amazon’s hometown Seattle, where Third Place managing partner Robert Sindelar says sales initially dropped after the Amazon store opened in November 2015, but had bounced back by the end of last year.
“So it feels that their larger impact on us was short-lived,” says Sindelar, the booksellers association’s new president. “However, any bookstore — Amazon, indie or chain store — that close is going to impact our sales to some degree.”