Brick-and-mortar bookshops look better than ever in the Amazon age
Welcome to the first Fast Company’s Plugged In of 2026, and Happy New Year to you.
More than 18 years ago, as the internet was transforming how we consume everything from news to music, someone called books “the last bastion of analog.” That someone happened to be Jeff Bezos. And he made the observation in a Steven Levy Newsweek article about Amazon’s original Kindle e-reader, a device designed to drag books into the digital age.
Bezos’s comment resurfaced in my consciousness last week, as I read a New York Times article by Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter on how the book publishing business fared in 2025. The upshot: It did pretty well overall, and remains a surprisingly analog enterprise.
To be clear, the internet in general—and Amazon in particular—has transformed how we buy and consume books. Market share figures for booksellers are tough to come by, but estimates show the company controlling 50% or more of print book sales, leaving chains such as Barnes & Noble and independents to jostle for what’s left. That’s before you account for e-books and audiobooks, where Amazon’s Kindle and Audible platforms are overwhelmingly dominant.
Despite that, paper books remain popular, and many people choose to buy them at brick-and-mortar stores. As of mid-December, roughly three-quarters of the 707 million books sold last year were of the traditional, dead-tree variety. In the first 10 months, e-books accounted for only 11% of revenue, down from 17% in 2016. The American Booksellers Association’s ranks swelled by 422 new shops—independent ones, not chain operations. On top of that, we got dozens of new Barnes & Noble locations, with more on their way.
All of that suggests that books in their classic form aren’t just running on fumes of nostalgia or consumer inertia. Much of what’s delightful about the whole experience of engaging with the medium is inherently physical, in ways that other media—music, movies, newspapers, magazines—are not.
I knew that a year ago when I declared that I was going to go out of my way to read dead-tree tomes in 2025, starting with the tower of them stacked on my nightstand. Taking the time to do so was a rewarding experience, and though life interfered with me reading as many as I’d hoped, I’m looking forward to continuing the quest in 2026 and beyond.
As I wrote in that newsletter, I’m hardly an e-book hater. They’re often cheaper than print equivalents. They let you carry your entire library wherever you go. They can be easily searched. For nonfiction volumes being read for research purposes—a meaningful chunk of my book consumption—they beat print as the best overall format.
Still, as I also wrote back then, e-books haven’t lived up to their full potential. Typographically and layout-wise, they remain rudimentary compared to paper. And even when they do things that print can’t, they don’t always do them well.
That’s been my experience with a new AI-powered Kindle feature called ”Ask this book.” Introduced last month for thousands of titles in the Kindle iPhone and iPad apps, it lets you use a chatbot-style interface to pose questions about a book’s contents. To avoid spoilers, it defaults to its answers reflecting only what you’ve read so far.
The tool has proven controversial, in part because authors aren’t compensated and can’t opt out. But when I tried it with my Kindle edition of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, the big problem was that it was terrible. Its responses repeatedly mangled factual material, from the circumstances of Jobs’ time at Reed College to the year the iPod was introduced. They also failed to provide any citations, rendering them useless as entry points for additional reading within the e-book.
“Ask this book” does have the potential to evolve into something more interesting and useful. But when it comes to the shopping experience, for both digital and print books, Amazon has been marching in the wrong direction for years. Author Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe how tech products tend to grow customer-hostile over time. In his new book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he declares Amazon to have reached a “terminal stage” of the phenomenon.
Indeed, the company’s original tagline—“Earth’s biggest bookstore”—now feels more like a threat than a promise. Even if you cut the company some slack for offering a shopping experience that’s relentlessly utilitarian rather than intellectually stimulating, the place is in shambles. Search results are smothered with unrelated sponsored links and blatantly AI-generated junk books. Pages devoted to specific authors may be missing books, or, worse, list ones they didn’t write. The search results for “John Grisham” started with a paperback copy of his 2002 novel The Summons for an absurd $51.76, with an estimated delivery turnaround of up to two weeks—even though Amazon also has it for under 10 bucks with free Prime overnight shipping.
For decades, the fact that local book shops couldn’t compete with Amazon’s massive inventory seemed like an existential weakness. But the best ones curate their selections in ways that offer a powerful alternative to Amazon’s unedited sprawl. To my knowledge, no online merchant has replicated the artful serendipity of brick-and-mortar book browsing, where wandering the aisles and stumbling across stuff you never knew existed is part of the point, not a distraction.
Recently, I did much of my holiday gift shopping at one of my favorite Bay Area bookstores, Menlo Park’s Kepler’s. A large store—but not a completely enormous one—it‘s a joy to get lost in. I didn’t have to elbow my way past AI slop or sponsored chum, and emerged with a stack of books I would never have discovered through online shopping.
Unlike Amazon, Kepler’s doesn’t offer discounts off list price. Actually, it tacks on a small surcharge to pay its employees a living wage. I am happy to pay it. The 70-year-old store, which almost went out of business in 2005, doesn’t feel like a relic. Instead, like every good bookstore, it’s an idea too vibrant to be rendered irrelevant by technology. It’s heartening to think the publishing industry has settled into a groove that will keep such neighborhood gems viable for years to come.
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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