Indie bookstores are making a shocking, triumphant comeback

The small American bookstore is back. Over the last five years, the number of independent bookstores in the U.S. jumped by 70%. In 2025 alone, 422 new bookstores opened, according to the American Booksellers Association.

The industry’s success was far from inevitable. For a long time, indie bookstores were struggling. In 1995, when Amazon opened as the “Earth’s largest bookstore” and started undercutting the prices at brick-and-mortar stores, readers quickly started shopping online. Small stores, which were already facing competition from chains like Borders, started to close. By 2009, the number of independent bookstores across the country had dropped to an all-time low. Experts predicted that the industry would collapse. But then instead of continuing to declline, the numbers instead started to reverse The growth accelerated after the pandemic.

“If you step back and try to understand what really happened from 2010 to today, it is a story of resilience,” says Ryan Raffaelli, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies industries that beat the odds and survive in unexpected ways in the wake of technological change. Raffaelli has spent years researching the turnaround of indie bookstores. “It’s a story of hope. And it’s a story about the power of community.”

A new strategy for a digital threat

Soon after the rise of Amazon, some bookstores tried to compete directly with the online giant by adding more titles to their stores, Raffaeli says. But others eventually adopted a different strategy, doubling down on what’s uniquely possible in a physical space.

First, there’s the ability to convene people—something that small bookstores have always done with readings and other events, but that they’re doing even more now. Some stores have as many as 500 events a year. “These are not just author events, but birthday parties, all these other types of things that are inviting people into the actual physical space to engage with other like-minded individuals that are passionate about literary topics,” says Raffaeli. “People start finding their own tribe and they go, and I want to be around these people.”

They’ve also leaned into curation: “They start curating what’s in the stores quite differently than what you would experience if you were going on Amazon, where you have this algorithm that’s sort of saying, okay, here’s the last three things you bought, this is what you’d like,” he says. “Independents, because they’re so tapped into the author community, are often doing things to introduce readers to books and genres that the algorithm has yet to figure out. It’s unclear if it will ever figure it out.”

That’s possible because the people who work at independent bookstores are at the cutting edge of what’s happening in literary culture, he says. Amazon hasn’t duplicated that. (When Amazon tried to open physical bookstores itself, they quickly failed because they didn’t have the same foundation of book lovers choosing books, or any sense of authenticity.)

Maybe most importantly, independent bookstores have made a sense of community core to their identity. They were some of the first businesses to advocate for shopping local. “It begins to shift the value proposition for why you would pay more in the independent bookstore compared to as if you were shopping online at a discount,” says Raffaeli. “Because many consumers will say, I will pay extra because I know that this is actually an investment in my community.”

That wasn’t the case in the early 2000s, when consumers were more willing to chase a deal online. Now more people are aware of the value of keeping physical bookstores open. “This is a part of a two-decade process of educating the consumer,” he says. “And also retooling the stores to highlight things that may have always been there, but to really help people understand and appreciate the experience of entering an environment like this.”

The pandemic boosted support

The pandemic was another existential threat for bookstores, but ended up boosting support. “I think that in some ways, the pandemic woke people up to processes that were invisible to them before and made them realize that they had to act to support what was important to them,” says Andy Hunter, the founder of Bookshop.org, a platform that launched in 2020 to help indie bookstores sell books more easily online.

Online sales helped many bookstores survive the shutdown, and still provide significant support. (Bookshop.org has sent more than $9 million to local stores in 2025, and independent bookstores’ own online sales have also grown.) But after the pandemic, there was even more interest in spending time in stores in person. “I think they benefitted from digital fatigue,” says Raffaeli. “People were excited to come back in and shop local and feel like the experience could exist and engage with other people in the store.”

Bookstores have always been a meeting place, but they keep finding ways to nudge people to stay longer. “I didn’t want to have a bookstore where it was just transactional, like you’re coming in, looking at books, and leaving,” says Maura Cheeks, the owner of Liz’s Book Bar, a bookstore in Brooklyn with a cozy bar that serves wine, beer from local breweries, and coffee and tea. “I wanted to create a public space where people could come and relax, feel inspired, meet strangers, and just sort of spend time.”

The store is one of a growing number to have a bar. It’s also a way to help a low-margin business survive and afford steep New York City rents. On a typical weekday, Liz’s Book Bar is filled with people talking and working at the bar; the store sees higher book sales on weekends, but the bar provides critical revenue. Other bookstores have found creative ways to add other merchandise with higher margins than books, from literary-themed socks to cookware next to a section of cookbooks.

Sharing best practices

Because the stores are geographically constrained, they’re more willing than other businesses to share best practices with each other. (They’re also motivated by the fact that bookstores are seen as cultural institutions, and there’s a shared goal to preserve that culture, not just compete as a small business.) The industry association, the American Booksellers Association, hosts frequent events where booksellers can meet and share tips or take classes.

“I took a class and you could see how these practices were being institutionalized into the new way of thinking about how we compete,” says Raffaeli. “All these stores that start opening are benefiting from this experimentation that happened in the early 2000s . . . the survivors around that time started diffusing these practices at the industry level. I think that’s a big part of the story: they’re coming together and they’re teaching each other.”

Raffaeli is now studying how the lessons from booksellers can be applied to other situations, from museums to movie theaters to companies that want to bring workers back to the office. “We’re seeing people want to engage with one another,” he says. “They want to feel like they’re part of something, a part of the social fabric of their community or their organization. But you have to give them a reason to engage and you have to create the right conditions for that to happen.”