Chapter 3: The State of Indie Bookselling

...and some possible futures

Hello, readers! I’m so glad you are here. In this newsletter, I’m zooming out to survey the landscape of indie bookselling as a whole, looking at how the industry has emerged from the pandemic economy: success + struggle = cognitive dissonance. Then I will profile two influential bookstores who are vigorously rethinking the structures of their businesses as they notch themselves ever more firmly into their communities. Also, the book recommendation section seems to be growing longer each month.

The State of Independent Bookselling

Contrary to all expectations, the number of indie bookstores rose in 2021, and then again in 2022. Some bookstores couldn’t weather the lockdown and were forced to close, but others found that lower rent enabled them to start or expand stores. A small but growing portion of these new stores are Black-owned bookstores, which now number 154. (Note that the figures below represent companies registered with the ABA, some of whom have multiple locations. In 2022, there were 2023 companies running 2506 stores.)

For context, in 1995, the year after Amazon began, there were 5500 independent bookstores with 7000 locations. The low point came in 2009 when there were 1650 independent stores, and the number has slowly grown since then. (Publishers Weekly wrote about this history last year.)

Ithaca has benefited from this trend: Odyssey Books, a jewel box of a store a few blocks from Buffalo Street Books, opened in 2020, reminding many long-time residents of a sylvan past when our college town could support a dozen new and used independent bookstores.

Another surprising fact: book sales fell in 2020, but the decrease came from a slowdown in textbook sales, institutional purchases, and library acquisitions, and adult trade books rose 9.6% in 2020, as people stuck at home during the lockdown discovered, again and again, the value of books.

Bookstore sales began to recover in 2021 to $8.47 billion, an increase of 39% over 2020, and 2022 showed another 6.2% increase. (source)

In fact, just as we appear to be in the midst of a recession, Forbes has declared bookstores as the very most recession-proof business, citing the growth in number of businesses during the Great Recession (2007-2009) and the early part of the pandemic, the growth in wages during those same eras, and the relatively low of starting a bookstore (around $75,000).

This, like the headlines that trumpet signs of the industry’s robust health or that praise the industry for its diversity, can feel like cognitive dissonance to those behind the scenes. The numbers require parsing, always. For instance, the reason wages have risen is partly because some employees have unionized and partly because some owners have relinquished profits to attract and retain talented staff. Bookstores defy market logic rather than exemplify it.

And not all bookstores have managed to track those trends. The graph of Buffalo Street Books’ annual total income (including sidelines and events) is more of a roller coaster.

Many, many bookstores have rethought and restructured their businesses lately, in response to the pandemic and in perpetual response to Amazon, which currently reaps roughly 70% of the online book business and 50% of all print book sales. The industry right now might plausibly be described as a national, dispersed, diverse laboratory for the innovation of supra-capitalist solutions to monopolistic behavior by finding new ways to connect sellers and readers. Booksellers in big cities and small towns are not just waiting around for a savior to deliver them into the future, or for the free market to magically realign around the value of books.

Maybe this means transforming into a nonprofit, or a worker- or consumer-owned cooperative. Maybe it means rethinking what a “store” is and exploring pop-up, events-driven, or social media sales. Maybe it means supplementing book sales with a coffeeshop or a bar where literary events can flourish. Maybe it means abandoning capitalism altogether to become an anti-profit bookstore, like the Massive Bookshop in Greenfield, Massachusetts, an online store with volunteer employees whose reason for being is to redistribute money to social justice causes, often ones that are overlooked by conventional nonprofit grantors.

Here are two bookstores who are leading the way in a rapidly evolving marketplace, with enormous thanks to Praveen Madan and Jeff Deutsch for their help in writing these stories.

Some Possible Futures

Kepler’s Books and Magazines, Menlo Park, CA

Kepler’s is a storied institution that has undergone several dramatic shifts in its business model over the course of its 67-year history. Roy Kepler started the store in 1955, when it functioned as a cultural center of progressive art and politics for the Bay Area, and his son Clark took over in 1980. But by 2005, Kepler’s was as riven by the industry’s mercilessness toward indies as other bookstores and they announced their closure. Kepler’s community of readers decided not to accept that outcome. Patrons organized a fundraising campaign, and the business was reorganized to include shareholders, a board of directors, and a membership program. Kepler’s rebounded and sales peaked in 2008, but then began falling 10 to 15 percent each year. The bookstore incurred losses and debts piled up. They entered a cycle familiar to many bookstores, in which thinning the inventory to pay bills accelerated the sales decline because customers couldn’t find books they wanted.

At the end of 2011, Kepler’s board made the hard decision to hold a liquidation sale and shut down the business. For a second time, a solution appeared. Praveen Madan, who with his wife Christin Evans owned Booksmith in San Francisco, offered to buy Kepler’s for one dollar if Clark would help him transition Kepler's to a sustainable new model in which employees could earn living wages and the community could support it in an ongoing way as a cultural institution. Their plan included renegotiating the bookstore's old debts, re-engaging the community, and raising new capital through donations and memberships. The result was two separate but allied legal entities: Kepler's Books, a community-financed social purpose corporation owned by Madan, and Kepler's Literary Foundation, a nonprofit organization which produces literary events, workshops, book clubs, and other programs. Patrons can choose to become members of Kepler’s Books, which entitles them to various benefits at the bookstore tied to their level of giving (including book discounts), or community supporters of Kepler’s Literary Foundation—or both.

And do they ever support Kepler’s. Praveen Madan, an energetic leader in the industry who has been notably transparent about his organization’s financials, reports that from 2012 to 2019 the bookstore averaged about $50,000 a year in membership fees, allowing it to profit around $28,500 a year. Without community financing, Kepler’s would not have stayed alive, much less improved staff wages, increased its inventory, and built a small cash reserve that it used to keep its staff employed during the pandemic. Over the same period of 2012-2019, the literary foundation financed 40% of its programming and operations through ticket sales, and the other 60% came from donations. They hold around 150 events a year, including an enviable list of marquee authors like Roxane Gay, Ann Patchett, Richard Dawkins, Rick Riordan, and Ijeoma Oluo, and they partner with local schools to bring authors and their books to over 15,000 students per year.

Kepler’s has drawn the most attention for its hybrid legal structure, but it has also become an incubator for radical organizational practices like involving its staff on all major decisions through transparent and inclusive decision making, profit sharing that distributes the vast majority of the store’s profits back to its employees based on hours worked, and a living wage surcharge at the register to improve staff compensation. Many other bookstores have set up similar hybrid legal structures to deepen their social impact, involve their community as donors and volunteers, and improve their sustainability.

After experiencing the record-high inflation of the last two years, Praveen and his team have concluded that the only way to continue improving staff wages—to keep up with the inflation and high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area—is to migrate Kepler's to a unified non-profit model. They are actively working with attorneys to prepare a case for the IRS. Praveen sees this situation as parallel to what news and media organizations have gone through over the last 10 to 15 years. 

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, Chicago, IL

In 1961, five students started a member-owned cooperative bookstore in the basement of the Chicago Theological Seminary in Hyde Park. Over the years, Seminary Co-op grew to become one of the best academic bookstores in the country with a rich backlist of small press and university press titles. One of their unofficial mottos is “no coffee, no knick-knacks, just books.” They pride themselves on not turning over their inventory quickly, on allowing books to remain on the shelves as long as it takes them to be discovered, on not requiring that books earn their real estate. In 1983, they opened 57^th Street Books just around the corner, with a wider selection of general interest books, including a children’s section. Seminary’s membership grew to over 50,000 people, famously including the Obamas.

But the story of Seminary Co-op’s evolution is not the expected capitalist tale of unimpeded growth. Jeff Deutsch, the director since 2014, has boldly refined and even reversed the store’s business model. In 2017, he disentangled membership from store ownership, creating a dual structure similar to Kepler’s but under one roof. Now, anyone in the world could become a member for free and receive perks, and anyone who wanted to become involved in store governance could purchase a share. Then came a daring and unexpected move. Seminary Co-op dissolved the cooperative in 2019 and reincorporated as a not-for-profit. No single individual or group stands to profit or lose by the bookstore’s business, yet the community’s investment in the store continues through the wide-open membership program. Seminary is not a 501c(3), but is governed by a board of directors with annual meetings open to the membership.

Seminary Co-op is the only not-for-profit bookstore whose sole mission is bookselling (as distinct from literary programming, or bookstores that support a separate mission like Housing Works in New York). Seminary Co-op fervently believes that the browsing experience itself is a cultural good worth protecting from the trade winds of the marketplace. Currently, membership in Seminary Co-op is free—you can join!—and members receive a 10% credit from every purchase to use toward future purchases.

And Seminary is not done elaborating on their business model. As they recover from the pandemic, they are launching two publishing imprints: Seminary Co-op Offsets, an imprint of Northwestern University Press which will feature works of literature and the humanities, including new translations, lost and out-of-print books, and works on the literary history of the South Side of Chicago; and Ode Books, an imprint of Prickly Paradigm Press, which will publish books on books, such as reflections on the cultural value of the book, analyses of the challenges that the industry faces, and ruminations on the intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic pleasures of reading. As Deutsch says, publishing extends “the very skills that the professional bookseller deploys in their craft—filtration, selection, assemblage, enthusiasm.”

The Next Chapter of Open Book

I’m hoping to bring you the first in a series of interviews with wildly passionate booksellers who run unconventional bookstores that depart from the mainstream, curating books and events for their specific customer bases and hitching their missions to sustainable business practices.

Book Recommendations

Last year, Jeff Deutsch, Director of Seminary Coop, published In Praise of Good Bookstores, a learned and elegant argument for the role of brick-and-mortar stores in the cultivation of a rich reading life. If readers don’t need bookstores to buy books, and if bookstores can’t survive by selling books, why bother? “Like the readers they serve, booksellers embrace the inefficient elements of the bookstore, understanding that they are anything but wasteful. Given than they are not only deliberate but critical to creating a good bookstore, the time has come to no longer apologize for the inefficiencies inherent in good bookselling.” What purpose do those inefficiencies serve? “Good bookstores reflect their communities; exceptional bookstores both reflect and create their communities.” And for Deutsch the “paramount importance” of the bookstore is the “browsers’ ability to lose themselves.” I could keep quoting this marvelous book for days, but instead you should just read it.

Praveen Madan of Kepler’s Books recommends Peter Block’s Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest, which argues for a new kind of leadership that is responsive both to customers and to one’s own workers, redistributing power and privilege as plain old good business sense.

I read a flat-out phenomenal novel last month. Biography of X by Catherine Lacey is a fictional biography of a magnetic, difficult, transgressive female artist, written by her wife after her sudden death. Do you ever read a book and have the thrilling feeling it was written just for you? This one absolutely was written for me (in my day job, I am a biographer of a female literary figure). It reminded me of A.S. Byatt’s Biographer’s Tale as ventriloquized by Alexandra Kleeman (whatever you do, don’t read Dwight Garner’s idiotic review of Biography of X in the New York Times, all plot spoiler and no insight). It also reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which might be described as Elena writing Lila’s biography after she goes missing, so if you love Ferrante, give the Lacey novel a try. And that reminds me of a few other excellent books I’ve read recently that have reminded me of Ferrante: Simone de Beauvoir, Inseparable, Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose, Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts, and Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love.

And remember that if you prefer audiobooks, you can find many of these titles at Libro.fm, the independent alternative to Audible, where you can choose the indie bookstore your audiobook purchase will benefit. Happy reading—and listening!