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Did You Know There’s an Independent Bookstore Revival Underway?

Americans fight back against big tech.

Late last month, American booksellers hit a major milestone. Across the United States, 2,000 bookshops celebrated Independent Bookstore Day—breaking participation records.

In a nation home to around 45,000 supermarkets and 400,000 independent restaurants, that may seem like a commendable but comparatively modest accomplishment. But in fact it’s a remarkable feat for retailers once considered an endangered species, doomed in the face of Amazon’s two-day shipping and e-book empire.

Despite the online shopping juggernaut’s best efforts, the ranks of America’s indie bookstores have swelled by 70 percent since 2020. The industry’s trade group, the American Booksellers Association, now counts 3,200 members. As a handful of Silicon Valley titans propel an ever-larger share of our economy, this surprising turnaround for formerly imperiled booksellers isn’t just unexpected good news—it’s proof Americans have both the desire and the ability to resist Big Tech.

Back in 1995, the ABA reported a banner year, dwarfing the current bookstore boom: 5,500 stores with 7,000 locations nationwide. It was a short-lived high, however. That same year, Amazon hung out its shingle as an online bookstore, operating at a loss and undercutting traditional retailers. Jeff Bezos hand-delivered its millionth order, a Princess Diana biography and a Microsoft Windows user guide, to a customer in Japan just two years later. (If he had really been committed to the publicity stunt, he would have made the trip without allowing himself a bathroom break.)

By Y2K, the number of indie bookstores had fallen by 3 percent—and that was before Amazon introduced its Kindle, which, in its early years, threatened to kill off the printed page altogether. ABA membership reached a modern nadir in 2009. Once-dominant corporate booksellers also faltered, with Borders declaring bankruptcy in 2011 and Barnes & Noble announcing plans to close a third of its stores.

As its growing popularity strangled physical booksellers, Amazon proved itself ruthless in dealings with the book industry, extorting fees and steep discounts from publishers, and making it difficult for customers to purchase releases from presses that showed the temerity to fight back. In 2017, the company piled........

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