It’s foolish to deny that Amazon is efficient and convenient. The corporate behemoth started primarily as a book-seller, but has since successfully branched out into . . . well, just about everything, even necromancy. And though book sales represent 10 percent of its overall revenue (“only” $280 billion), that was enough for the company to sell “substantially more than half” of all books in the U.S., “including new and used physical volumes as well as digital and audio formats,” according to a 2019 New York Times story. That story adds that Amazon is also “a platform for third-party sellers, a publisher, a printer, a self-publisher, a review hub, a textbook supplier and a distributor that now runs its own chain of brick-and-mortar stores.”
Given all that, and other economic challenges, both specific to bookstores and to the economy at large, you’d think that your classic brick-and-mortar would be in trouble. Not so. According to a recent New York Times story, such establishments are, in fact, thriving. From the story:
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 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 earlier this year, 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.
This being the New York Times, there is a focus on the fact that many of these bookstores are women- and minority-owned and focused. Which I don’t oppose; let a thousand bookstores bloom — just don’t make me buy something from all of them. Especially ones that may resemble the parody feminist bookstore in Portlandia (sketches about which were filmed in a real feminist bookstore . . . until the real one grew offended at the parody and cut ties with the show).
Regardless, I find this trend encouraging. For though I support free markets, my support thereof is most tested when institutions I like fall victim to economic churn. In this, I embody in myself a familiar tension on the right: Conservatives generally support markets, but also tend to embrace what Russell Kirk called the “permanent things,” whose physical manifestations can fall victim to creative destruction. Proponents of Amazon — a company I respect, and whose services I use — can talk all they want about how effective a bookseller it is. (Though they might be harder-pressed to defend the company’s own bookstores. They are sterile locales, stripped by algorithm of any real character. They resemble the newsstand-type establishments found at airports — airports, themselves paragons of neoliberalism, hence Pete Buttigieg’s affinity for them.) But bookstores have value that goes beyond the merely economic. They can, for example, serve as community hubs. As the Times story notes, many of the bookstores that survived the pandemic lockdowns were important for their communities and supported by them through that difficult time; many remain community-driven.
There is, moreover, more to buying a book than algorithms can capture. Sure, a lot can be gleaned by surveillance capitalism’s tracking of our digital identities, telling us what we want before we even realize we want it. (At some point, is it too much to wonder where the algorithms end and where our identities begin?) But some of the best books are unexpected discoveries, dependent on the physical inventory of an actual location. I’ve found some of my favorite books by wandering into a bookstore unsure of what I was going to get. I procured The Time Traveler’s Almanac, an excellent, 72-story anthology of time-travel short stories, in precisely this manner. In life, and in books, we don’t always know what we want; there is often merit in spontaneity, and in “variety,” to use another term Kirk favored.
At any rate, in this instance, the surprising success of bookstores — even amid challenges from economic reality and the convenience of competitors — resolves (temporarily) a thorny conservative dilemma. And that is far from the only reason to celebrate their prosperity.