The pandemic wasn’t good for much, but it was good for bookstores. Exactly how good is a little hard to measure. For all sorts of reasons, the data on book sales, bookstores, and most things bookish are notoriously inexact. Not only is there no settled definition of what counts as a bookstore; there is no settled definition of what counts as a book.
If I self-publish a book and sell it on my Web site, is that a real book? And am I a bookstore? If we think that, to be “real,” a book must have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), we are faced with the fact that the ISBN of a hardcover book is different from the ISBNs of the paperback, audio, and digital editions of the same book. Are these all counted separately? The Bible is a book. So are “Pickleball for Dummies,” “Spanking Zelda,” “Pat the Bunny,” and “The Big Book of Sudoku.” When we ask how many Americans read books, are those the kinds of books we have in mind?
According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand. Still, it’s generally agreed that book sales rose after 2019 and that, since the end of the pandemic, there has been a small but significant uptick in the number of independent bookstores. Explaining the first bump seems simple enough. Reading turned out to be a popular way of passing the time in lockdown, more respectable than binge-watching or other diversions one might think of. A slight decline in sales over the past couple of years suggests that people felt freed up to go out and play pickleball instead of staying home and trying to finish “War and Peace.”
The explanation for the second bump, however, is not so obvious. Before COVID, physical bookstores seemed to be pretty high on the endangered-species list. Between 1998 and 2020, more than half of the independent bookstores in the United States went out of business. Yet, somehow, the bookstore outlived the pandemic. Why? Two new books, Evan Friss’s “The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore” (Viking) and “The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: True Stories of the Magic of Reading” (Little, Brown), compiled by James Patterson and Matt Eversmann, suggest a few reasons.
Neither book is quite as advertised. “The Bookshop” is not a comprehensive history of bookselling. It’s a series of thirteen mini-profiles of notable bookstores and their owners, from Benjamin Franklin and his printing shop in the early eighteenth century to Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s brick-and-mortar stores today. Friss does not get very deep into the economic nitty-gritty of the business. He is mainly interested in capturing the bookstore vibe.
James Patterson is, yes, James Patterson, one of the best-selling authors ever. (Matt Eversmann, a former Army Ranger, was a central character in Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down” and is a best-selling author himself.) When the pandemic started, Patterson launched a movement, #SaveIndieBookstores, to help such businesses survive. He pledged half a million dollars, and, with the support of the American Booksellers Association and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, the campaign ended up raising $1,239,595 from more than eighteen hundred donors.
Patterson and Eversmann’s “Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians” is being promoted with the line “Their stories are better than the bestsellers.” Better than “Spanking Zelda”? I don’t think so. Readers hoping for scandalous revelations will have to be satisfied with heartfelt testimonials from some sixty or so North American bookstore people and librarians, who talk about how they got their jobs and why they love them. A number of them have nice things to say about James Patterson, as well they should. Still, the situation these books are addressing is a very old one.
The United States has had a bookstore problem since before the nation’s founding. There have never been enough. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, books were sold mostly by printers, like Franklin, whose store was in Philadelphia, or publishers, such as Ticknor & Fields, which operated the Old Corner Bookstore, in Boston. (Ticknor & Fields later became part of Houghton Mifflin.) Because there were few places for customers to get books, some entrepreneurs figured out ways to get books to them. There was a book barge on the Erie Canal in the early nineteenth century, for example, and there were book caravans—vehicles outfitted to display books for sale—until well into the twentieth century.
Even after the distribution of books improved, it was not easy to get your hands on new ones unless you lived in a major city or a college town. In 1939, about a hundred and eighty million books were produced, in one estimate, but only twenty-eight hundred stores sold them. Books were also sold in gift shops that stocked a few titles or department stores that offered discounted books as a loss leader to attract a tonier class of customer.
Americans could buy books by mail directly from publishers, and they could subscribe to book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926, or its rival, the Literary Guild, founded in 1927 and once owned by Doubleday. (Those clubs still exist. They print their own editions, which they sell for well below the publisher’s retail price.) But most people had no way to browse new books.
One reason for the distribution problem is that each book is a unique good. It is handcrafted by a writer and a postproduction team of editors and designers. Even in 1939, there were too many new titles for a small shop to stock—an estimated 10,640, and that doesn’t include perennial sellers, like Bibles and dictionaries, or classics.
And, unless you are a “just looking for something to read on the beach” kind of customer, there are usually no acceptable substitutes. When you go to a supermarket, the store may carry two brands of milk or ten. It doesn’t matter. You just want milk. But book buying doesn’t work that way. You want the book you want. If the choice was between doing without and mailing a check to a publisher in New York City (publishers, stupidly, did not have warehouses in the middle of the country), many people probably chose to do without. This was not a sensible way to run a business.
The problem got bigger after the Second World War, when, thanks in part to a huge increase in the number of college students, who had to buy books for their courses, and the relaxation of obscenity laws, which made books more attractive to grownups, the publishing industry boomed. In 1950, eleven thousand new titles appeared, according to Publishers Weekly; in 1970, the number was thirty-six thousand, a threefold increase. Local bookshops tended to be low-margin affairs. They couldn’t afford the rent for large retail spaces, and the load of new books was too heavy for them to carry. Publishers needed more places where people could shop for their product. The market responded with the chain store.
The first major bookstore chains were B. Dalton, which opened a store in 1966 and by 1978 had outlets in forty-three states, and Waldenbooks, which began in the nineteen-thirties as a book-rental company, opened its first retail store in 1962, and by 1981 had seven hundred and thirty-five outlets. Chain stores were big spaces. They could carry many titles, and they were usually embedded in department stores and malls. Like supermarkets, they were basically self-service. Their staff were generally not trained to make reading recommendations. But the chains offered two things the independent-bookstore ecosystem lacked: convenience and inventory. By 1982, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton made about twenty-four per cent of all book sales in the United States.
It was still not enough. The industry kept growing, and the chain stores gave way to the superstores. These were enormous freestanding retail spaces, averaging almost thirty-six thousand square feet and carrying a hundred and twenty-five thousand titles, plus other leisure goods, such as CDs and DVDs. The big players were Borders, which opened in 1971 and began to expand in the nineteen-eighties, and Barnes & Noble, an old New York store, situated on lower Fifth Avenue, which Leonard Riggio bought in 1971.
Riggio adopted the strategy of selling New York Times best-sellers at a forty-per-cent discount. He made the brand famous for these discounts, and people would travel out of their way to a Barnes & Noble store just for the savings. It was an aggressive move when best-sellers were what kept many small bookstores above water.
In 1987, Riggio bought B. Dalton, and by 1997 Barnes & Noble and Borders were selling forty-three per cent of all books in the United States. By then, more than sixty thousand titles were coming out every year. The largest Barnes & Noble store carried upward of two hundred thousand, many of them marked twenty or thirty per cent off the list price. It was not a business model that small independent bookshops could adopt. They had to make a decent margin on every sale.
This was around when the term “independent bookstore” gained force. It was plainly deployed as a rallying cry. It couldn’t have been that the owners of the local store didn’t care about their bottom lines. But the term signals an old-fashioned virtue, and the independents versus the superstores got cast as a David-and-Goliath struggle, a version of the family-farm-versus-agribusiness rivalry that had got a lot of attention in the nineteen-eighties.
The big-little bookstore battle was covered so extensively by the media, in fact, that a film about it, “You’ve Got Mail,” directed by Nora Ephron, was one of the biggest hits of 1998. (Amusingly, the movie, ostensibly a criticism of corporate overreach, made Rolling Stone’s list of “Most Egregious Product Placements in Movie & TV History.” It is practically an advertisement for AOL, which would soon merge with Warner Bros., the film’s distributor.)
Meg Ryan’s character made out all right in “You’ve Got Mail,” but her store still closed. Nationally, the Davids were losing. After 1998, the mortality rate among independents shot up. By 2021, only about two thousand were still in business. The Goliaths were left to slug it out. In 2011, Riggio bought what was left of Borders, which had declared bankruptcy, and Barnes & Noble is now the only nationwide bookstore chain in the United States, with six hundred stores. (The original flagship store, on lower Fifth, which had become mainly a place for students to buy textbooks, closed in 2014.)
