Indie Bookstores Are Unaffected by the E-Book Phenomenon. Libraries? That’s A Different Story.
- Margo Ghertner
- Dec 8, 2018
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 11, 2018
On the morning of November 9th, 2016, just after the 58th presidential election of the United States, Nick Petrulakis walked into Brookline Booksmith on what he thought would be just another day at the store. The assistant manager of 57-year-old independent bookstore went to the unlock the door. It was 8:30am—three people waited outside.
“I open the door and there’s a woman standing there and she looks up and she says ‘Thank you for being here.’ and she’s crying. And so that’s something that made me feel really good because that’s our goal—we want to provide a safe space where everyone feels welcome,” he says. “More importantly, the atmosphere of the store is welcoming and you see it in times like that.”
The community element of independent booksellers, like Booksmith, is what has many sticking to the purchasing physical books when it comes to reading for pleasure in 2018.
Norah Piehl, the Executive Director of the Boston Book Festival, expressed that Boston’s primary book festival did have talks about what impact that e-books could have on the festival, but the concern of those talks never came to fruition.
“In 2011, there was a lot of conversation about that opportunity for authors to sign books. What do we do if people have Kindles? How are we going to have someone sign a Kindle,” she says. “Those conversations have pretty much stopped happening because people are buying the physical books.”
In fact, Piehl stated that at 2018’s 10th Annual Boston Book Festival, book sales did the best they ever had in the history of the festival.
“We have been fortunate in that we work with almost all the independent booksellers in Boston in some capacity. This year we worked with seven different booksellers to sell books on the day of the festival,” she says.
In his work with Brookline Booksmith, Petrulakis stated that he has seen an interesting change in 2018 in regards to e-book sales.
“In 2015 and 2016, the decline in e-book sales was really precipitous and then in slowed down in 2017. I think the year to date sales were 10% lower, in the previous two years it was much greater than that,” he says. “At the same time that year, regular book sales increased a little bit. So, the reports of our death were a little premature,”
In addition to e-book sales decreasing, Petrulakis expressed that the number of independent bookstores has increased.
“Since 2009, the number of indie bookstores has increased by 40% and that’s in the face of up until then, indie bookstores were closing since the mid-90s when Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon really started to take it back,” he says. “We’ve seen this weird flip–part of that is because as Borders goes away, a vacuum is created, and indies can go to some of those communities, reopen, and provide a service.”
The library world, on the other hand, has a different perspective when it comes to e-books.
Steve Smith, Head of Collection Development at Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library, says not only that they are seeing a major shift to e-books, but they are also getting rid of many physical copies.
“For academics, most people are shifting towards e-books—due to convenience, the ability to get it right now, to put it on their iPad where they carry their life and their work; The e-book carries much better,” he says.
Another large reason libraries are gravitating towards e-books? They don’t have the capacity carry as many books as they used to, according to Smith.
“Especially on an urban campus where space is the most coveted thing, building up footprints is very expensive, so people have to think very carefully about what they are devoting space to,” he says.
As the library’s circulation rates of physical books goes down, Smith says that keeping a large warehouse of print collections is harder to justify.
“Fewer books go through circulation whereas our usage of e-books is going through the roof. You see campus libraries like Northeastern, where they only have one floor of books,”
Although Anne Reed, the Assistant Library Director of the Brookline Public Library, makes it clear public libraries will always have physical books.
“Our e-book circulation is skyrocketing. We’ve done more than 90,000 in a year which is a pretty good percentage point,” she says. “We still have a very strong hard cover and paperback physical book circulation and that’s not going away, people want that. We’ve also discovered that often times students like having the e-books, but when they read for pleasure, they want the actual books.”
In addition to providing books and other digital resources, the Brookline Public Library keeps with the times by acting like a general community center. Through book clubs and various outreach programs in the Brookline community, their goal is to connect the community through the power of storytelling.
When it comes to this idea of the library as a community center, Erin Murphy, an associate professor of English at Boston University, wonders about the impacts e-books could have on cultivating community in 2018.
“It’s interesting to see how the library can function in a neighborhood to build community with still having the books there,” she says. “As the books go away and more and more of their resources go online, I guess one of the things we’re all going to have to figure out is how do we build relationships with each other in space when we've lost that way of doing things.”
Murphy, who studies 17th century English literature, says that this is just another way of present history mirroring the 17th century when it comes to the adaption of the e-book.
“They are living through the moment where the explosion of print is something that makes them incredibly excited and nervous,” she says. “And so even though it's not exactly the same as our own moment, you do see overlaps in the kinds of reactions that people have.
They get very nervous over the fact that there are so many books and so much information.”
As Murphy and many others have grappled with the impacts technology can have on personal, human connection and storytelling, she still thinks back to the 17th century as a way to understand these changes in time.
“It’s not simple, it’s not straight forward, it’s not a direct line of progress, but they also figure it out. That’s something I try to keep in mind when there is too much information or the technology is unnerving or destabilizing us,” she says. “I do feel like people strangely read more than they used to—there are pluses and minuses for the life of the book.”
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