More than 300 bookstores have opened in the past couple of years — a revival that is meeting a demand for “real recommendations from real people.”
“People told Lucy Yu it was a crazy time to open a bookstore in Chinatown. It was early 2021, and the pandemic had devastated the neighborhood, forcing dozens of stores and restaurants to close. The rise of anti-Asian hate crimes had shaken residents and local business owners.
But Ms. Yu believed that a bookstore was just what the neighborhood needed.
She raised around $20,000 on GoFundMe, enough to rent a narrow storefront — a former funeral supply store — on Mulberry Street in downtown Manhattan. A neighborhood grant gave her $2,000 for shelves and books. And in December [2021], she opened Yu and Me Books, which specializes in titles by and about immigrants and people of color.
The store was profitable within four months, Ms. Yu said.
Yu and Me Books is one of more than 300 new independent bookstores that have sprouted across the United States in the past couple of years, in a surprising and welcome revival after an early pandemic slump. And as the number of stores has grown, the book selling business — traditionally overwhelmingly white — has also become much more diverse.
“People were hungry for a place focused on Asian American and immigrant stories,” said Ms. Yu, 27, who worked as a chemical engineer and supply chain manager before opening the store. “That’s something I was always searching for when I went to bookstores, and I wanted people to come here and not have to search.”
Two years ago, the future of independent book selling looked bleak. As the coronavirus forced retailers to shut down, hundreds of small booksellers around the United States seemed doomed. Bookstore sales fell nearly 30 percent in 2020, U.S. Census Bureau data showed. The publishing industry was braced for a blow to its retail ecosystem, one that could permanently reshape the way readers discover and buy books.
Instead, something unexpected happened: Small booksellers not only survived the pandemic, but many are thriving.
“It’s kind of shocking when you think about what dire straits the stores were in in 2020,” said Allison Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization for independent bookstores. “We saw a rally like we’ve never seen before.”
The association now [in July 2022] has 2,023 member stores in 2,561 locations, up from 1,689 in early July of 2020. Some of the growth reflects the renewal of memberships by existing stores that put off doing it last year amid the uncertainly caused by the pandemic. But there has also been a sharp and sustained rise in new bookshops, and more than 200 additional stores are preparing to open in the next year or two, Ms. Hill said.
Many stores have also seen a bump in profits. In a survey of booksellers [in 2022], the association found that some 80 percent of respondents said they saw higher sales in 2021 than in 2020, and nearly 70 percent said their sales last year were higher than 2019, Ms. Hill said.”
-via The New York Times, 7/10/22. Excerpt continues below.
“At Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, revenue was up by 20 percent in 2021, and the store made more money last year than it did in 2019, according to the owner, Valerie Koehler. Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of Books & Books, an independent chain in South Florida, said sales were up more than 60 percent in 2021 compared to 2020.
Many of the new stores that opened during the pandemic are run by nonwhite booksellers, among them The Salt Eaters Bookshop in Inglewood, Calif., which specializes in books by and about Black women, girls and nonbinary people; the Libros Bookmobile, a Latina-owned mobile bookstore in a converted school bus in Taylor, Texas, which stocks fiction in Spanish and English, and Reader’s Block, a Black-owned bookshop in Stratford, Conn.
...One unexpected outcome of the pandemic was the way many communities rallied around their local bookstores in a time of crisis. When in-person shopping plummeted during the shutdown, bookstores rapidly scaled up their online sales operations, and found other ways to keep their customers, including curbside pickup, home delivery, outdoor pop-up stores and bookmobiles. Readers, it turned out, were eager for print books during the pandemic, and the spike in sales continued into 2021, when publishers sold nearly 827 million print books, an increase of roughly 10 percent over 2020, according to NPD BookScan.
The new crop of bookstores may also be a byproduct of broader pandemic-driven shifts in the economy as people re-evaluated their lives and changed professions, and retail spaces became more affordable. Government assistance to small businesses helped many bookstores weather the shutdown, while stimulus checks enabled some people to leave their jobs and start new businesses.
Julie Ross quit her job in human resources at Google this year to open Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, Pa., with two friends who left academia. They opened their “queer, feminist indie bookstore” — there is a table near the front with books about abortion — in a conservative part of the state, close to where one of her co-owners grew up.
The pandemic “burst the bubble of believing we had any control over what was coming,” Ms. Ross said. “We had this moment of, ‘What are we waiting for?’”
...[As for Yu and Me Books, [author Ava Chin], whose family has lived in Chinatown for generations, said that the store has become a gathering spot for artistic and literary-minded locals, and something of an Asian American literary hub. Its packed calendar includes a bilingual poetry reading with the poet Yam Gong, a book launch for the writer and essayist Larissa Pham, and a signing with the novelist Marie Myung-Ok Lee.
At a moment when anti-Asian hate crimes have surged, the store has also come to feel like a safe haven, Ms. Chin said. In March, the shop held an event to raise awareness and distributed more than 1,000 safety alarms and pepper spray canisters.
“It’s not just a bookstore, it really is a de facto community space,” Ms. Chin said. “I don’t think we realized we needed a bookstore until we had one.””
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Civic Middle EATS offers girls and BIPOC-owned enterprise platform to shine
Civic Middle Eats spring sequence kicks off on Wednesday
Civic Middle Eats spring sequence kicks off on Wednesday
02:09
A meals truck custom kicks off in Denver’s Civic Middle Park this week. Civic Middle EATS brings meals vehicles and their most interesting delicacies to the park, simply in time for lunch.
CBS
Civic Middle EATS might be at Civic Middle Park most Wednesdays and Thursdays from…
