Six hundred and five bookstores

I mentioned in an earlier piece, on reading slowly, that independent bookshops have been opening rather than only closing, and then I didn't give a number because I didn't have one I trusted. Now I do. The American Booksellers Association's 2025 annual report, released in late May, counts 605 new independent bookstores opened in the US last year. It's the fifth consecutive year above 200. The association now represents more than 3,400 stores across nearly 3,800 locations, and its membership grew 19 percent last year and 151 percent over six years.

Two honest caveats. The ABA publishes openings and not closures, so this is not a net figure and shouldn't be read as one. And its CEO, Allison Hill, described 2025 as both a banner year and the most challenging year for indies on record, which is a more useful summary than the headline number. There's no comparable Canadian count. BookNet Canada's survey of the sector is from 2018, so anyone quoting a Canadian figure at you is estimating.

Still, 605 is a lot of people choosing to open a bookstore in a year when the sensible advice was not to.

The question that interests me is what they're actually selling, because it plainly isn't convenience or price. Anyone can have any book delivered tomorrow for less. A shop that competes on those terms has already lost, and the ones opening seem to know it.

What a good shop sells is a shortlist. Someone has read a great deal, decided what's worth the shelf, and arranged it so that you find the thing you didn't know to ask for. That's the opposite of a search box, which can only return what you already thought of. Every book I've loved in the last five years came from a table, a friend, or a review, and none of them came from a recommendation engine, which mostly offers me a slightly worse version of what I just bought.

Vancouver has an unusually good set of these. Massy Books in Chinatown is Indigenous-owned and has given a substantial share of its revenue to local organizations. Upstart and Crow on Granville Island has been running since 2020 and treats its events as the main product. The Paper Hound on West Pender is small and heavily curated. Iron Dog Books on East Hastings began as a book truck. Pulpfiction has been on Main since 2000, though it lost its Kitsilano location a few years ago. Kidsbooks has been on West Broadway for over forty years. More than twenty local shops took part in Canadian Independent Bookstore Day in April.

The second thing a shop sells, and I think this is underrated commercially, is a reason to be somewhere. A bookstore is one of the last indoor places you can enter with no money and no appointment and stay for half an hour without anyone approaching you. That's a rarer proposition than it used to be, and a good part of why people go.

The pattern isn't unique to books. Independent cinemas, record shops, small galleries. The common thread is that all of them lost the efficiency argument completely and then found that efficiency wasn't the whole of what people wanted. The businesses that survived were the ones offering something the efficient version structurally cannot: selection made by a person, and a room to be in.

I don't think this makes the economics easy. Hill's phrasing about the most challenging year on record is doing real work in that sentence. But it does suggest the diagnosis was wrong. The thing that was supposed to kill the bookshop was the availability of books, and the availability of books turns out to be the least interesting service a bookshop provides.

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