In a 1936 essay, George Orwell recognized one of the main difficulties of owning an independent bookshop: turning a profit. The bookshop, he wrote, “is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.” Nearly 80 years on, the business has hardly gotten easier.
More than one-third of the independent bookshops in Britain and Ireland have disappeared in the past decade, unable to compete with large retailers — chiefly Amazon — who use their superior market position to offer deep discounts on printed and digital books.
According to data released last week from the Booksellers Association, which represents independent publishers, the downward trend continued last year, with around 50 bookshops closing, including one of England’s oldest, the Ibis Bookshop in Banstead, Surrey, which was a mainstay on the town’s high street for 78 years. Tim Godfray, the Booksellers Association’s chief executive, said it had been difficult to watch one store close after the next. “The last few years have been really tough,” he added.
As with the success of e-books — which are popular in some markets and mostly ignored in others — the health of independent bookstores varies considerably from one country to the next.
In the United States, independent bookstores have rebounded strongly from the financial crisis, increasing their numbers by 27 percent since 2009, according to data from the American Booksellers Association. The group’s chief executive, Oren Teicher, said American indie bookshops have filled the vacuum left by big box bookstores like Borders (which went out of business in 2011) and Barnes & Noble (which has closed hundreds of stores). They have also capitalized on a spirit of localism and urban renewal that is coursing through some American cities. “The enthusiasm and optimism is pretty staggering,” Mr. Teicher said. “Despite all the quantum leaps in technology, the fact is nothing beats a physical, bricks-and-mortar store to discover books that you didn’t know about.”
In France, the number of independent bookstores has remained constant for most of the past decade. There, as well as in Germany and some other European countries, prices of new books are fixed by law.
Guillaume Husson, a representative of the French booksellers union, said regulations like these have protected independent bookstores from “the politics of aggressive discounting that have been fatal to the network of bookstores in countries like the United Kingdom.” Britain had a similar price maintenance rule, the Net Book Agreement, until the mid-1990s when it was challenged and eventually overturned by a British court.
Mr. Godfray said he was “deeply envious” of the gains independent bookstores have made in the United States — where there is also no fixed-price system — but noted that British indie bookstores face even tougher odds, having to contend not just with Amazon, but also with fierce local competition and occupancy costs that “are much higher than what the American retailer experiences,” he said.
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