BOOK BIZ COOKIN’
City sees indie store boomlet
New Yorkers like to think we have it all: the most Michelinstarred restaurants, the tallest building in the country and more theaters than any other city in the world.
But we’re woefully short of bookstores. The closure of four Barnes & Noble stores starting in 2014 has left Queens’ 2.3 million residents with only one general-interest bookstore, and The Bronx’s 1.4 million denizens with none.
New York City’s 8.5 million residents now have eight Barnes & Nobles and fewer than 100 independent bookstores. France, by contrast, has eight times NYC’s population, but 2,500 bookstores.
And yet, a new group of bibliophiles-turned-business-owners is bringing more bookstores to NYC. The Lit. Bar in the South Bronx, Books Are Magic in Brooklyn and the tentatively titled Forest Bookshop in Queens are set to open by year-end, each in direct response to the loss of a local bookstore.
“We live in the neighborhood, and couldn’t bear the idea of not having a bookstore,” said novelist Emma Straub, whose 1,800-squarefoot store debuts on May 1 at 225 Smith St., six blocks from the site of iconic indie BookCourt, which closed last year.
The indie-bookstore boomlet also includes Greenlight Bookstore, which opened its second Brooklyn outpost last year, and WORD, a 10-year veteran expanding its children’s section into a new space two doors down from its Greenpoint shop.
Book lovers are greeting these entrepreneurs with a flood of goodwill — and thousands in crowdfunding cash. Building a viable business, however, means contending with New York’s notoriously high rents, and the paper-thin profit margins of an industry that’s been decimated by Amazon. The online titan opens its first New York City brick-and-mortar bookstore this spring at Columbus Circle, and a second one on West 34th Street this summer. Barnes & Noble also plans to open more local stores.
“The challenges are enormous,” said Oren Teicher, chief executive officer of American Booksellers Association, noting that French and German bookstores are protected by a ban on Amazon-style deep discounting. “They think [bookstores are] an important part of the cultural heritage and mission of the city.”
Neither Amazon nor e-books, however, have destroyed shoppers’ desire for local bookstores. Indepen- dent bookstore sales rose about 5 percent in the US in 2016, and new stores outpaced closures last year — even as bankruptcies and contraction roiled the broader retail sector.
The resurgence of shopping local has helped, while crowdfunding provides a new source of nonbank capital. The Lit. Bar’s Noelle Santos, a third-generation entrepreneur, has exceeded her original Kickstarter goal of $100,000, raising $127,000 to date. The three partners in The Forest Bookshop, who met while working at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble, raised $72,000 on Kickstarter, netting $65,000 after fees.
However, bibliophiles-turnedbooksellers take on a 14-hour-a-day, seven-days-a-week retail grind, for profit margins as low as 2 percent. Straub, a former BookCourt employee, and the partners in Forest Bookshop bring relevant experience, while Santos is a NYC startup competition winner.
But neither long hours nor sobering ABA statistics can dampen Santos’ dream of being surrounded by books full time.
“I’m off to bookland,” Santos said.