The Quiet Return of the Neighbourhood Bookshop
The obituary was written so many times that it stopped being news. First the chains arrived and took the high street. Then the internet arrived and took the chains. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the independent bookshop was supposed to have quietly expired.
It did not. There are more independent bookshops trading now than there were ten years ago, and the growth has been steady rather than sudden. That is the part worth paying attention to. A spike is a fashion. A decade of slow increase is a change in the underlying conditions.
What actually changed
The simplest explanation is the least romantic one. Rents fell in the places where these shops open, and they fell for the same reason the chains left. When a unit sits empty for eighteen months, a landlord who wanted a national covenant will take a local one.
The second reason is that the thing being sold changed. A bookshop that competes on price against a warehouse has already lost. A bookshop that competes on selection has lost too, because no shelf beats an infinite one. What is left is judgement, and judgement turns out to be surprisingly hard to replicate.
Walk into a good one and the stock is an argument. Someone has decided that these four hundred titles are worth your attention out of the two hundred thousand published this year, and they have arranged them so that one leads to another. That is an editorial act. It is closer to what a magazine does than to what a warehouse does.
The events problem
Almost every shop that has survived runs events, and almost every owner will tell you privately that events are exhausting and barely profitable. They persist because the alternative is worse.
An event converts a shop from a place you visit when you need something into a place you belong to. That distinction is the whole business. The customer who comes to a reading on a Tuesday buys books on a Saturday, and buys them at full price, and does not check the price on their phone first.
The risk is obvious enough. A shop that becomes a venue stops being a shop. The ones that get it right keep the events small and keep them tied to the stock. The ones that get it wrong end up running a cafe with a books problem.
What this is not
It would be easy to read this as a story about people rejecting the internet, and that reading is wrong. Most of these shops sell online. Many of them do it through the same infrastructure that was supposed to have killed them. The owners are not luddites and the customers are not making a political point when they walk in.
What they are doing is buying a filter. In a market where supply is effectively infinite and free, the scarce thing is someone trustworthy telling you what is good. That is a durable position, and it is not obvious that any amount of computation dislodges it.
The chains understood scale. The internet understood distribution. Nobody has yet worked out how to industrialise taste, and until somebody does, there is a business in a small room with four hundred well chosen books in it.