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SMALL-FORMAT BOOKSTORES PONDER NEXT CHAPTER

By Dees Stribling

The past year has made for some depressing reading for independent bookstores. Several have closed, some of them in places that traditionally supported a thriving book trade. New York City’s Coliseum Books, for instance, a Manhattan fixture for some three decades, closed for good in January. A location on Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley, Calif., could not save the Cody’s Books flagship, which had been there since 1965 and closed last summer. Meanwhile, across the Bay in San Francisco, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books shut the final chapter of its considerable history last year.

The retail book business is clearly not what it was even 15 or 20 years ago, and the change has not been kind to small booksellers. Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, once local and then regional booksellers themselves, have grown to gargantuan proportions. Even more pervasive is Internet bookselling, pioneered by Amazon.com but now also the province of many other virtual retailers, including eBay. Moreover, in the past decade the American Booksellers Association suffered a drastic shrinkage in membership: In 1996 there were slightly more than 4,000 members; last year the number was only 1,625.

Does this all mean that the book trade’s independents and small chains will go, to borrow a term from the history of retail, the way of the five-and-dime? The ABA, for one, is quick to point out positive countertrends in bookselling. Following pitifully small numbers of bookstore openings among independents and small chains over most of the past decade, the association reports that 90 bookstores opened around the country in 2005 and 97 in 2006. “The number of new stores demonstrates that independent bookselling is very much alive and well in the 21st century,” said Avin Mark Domnitz, CEO of the association. “The reports of the decline of independents have, again, been exaggerated.”

“Decline” might indeed be too strong a word, but “contraction” could be apt in view of a larger squeeze on independent retailers of all stripes. “Times are tougher for every kind of independent retailer,” said Mary Brett Whitfield, senior vice president of Retail Forward, a consulting firm. “With consolidation, there are fewer players in each line of trade. That’s certainly the case for bookstores. There’s been a winnowing. But I don’t believe that independents, or the small chains, are going to completely disappear. In some places independents can still thrive, if they focus on the needs of a specific trade area or community and if they can offer something unique to consumers, something the big chains and the Internet can’t.”

But if independent bookstores do not survive, it certainly will not be for any lack of effort to find niches. The bookstores that opened last year represent a variety of specialties. The new Sherlock’s Tomes, in Bridgeton, N.J., for instance, the second store of that name under the same ownership, sells mysteries and detective fiction, with an emphasis on British imports. Shade of Grey Bookstore, in Indianapolis, bills itself as woman-centered, a fairly new sort of bookstore for such a relatively small city.

Though the ABA does not classify its new members by the kind of retail property they occupy, an unscientific survey of the new bookstores reveals that they often occupy storefronts or other small, freestanding buildings, sometimes single-tenant properties. But they have found places in more-upscale retail properties too, even in lifestyle centers. A third Liberty Books & News opened last year, at the Shops on Lane Avenue in the affluent Columbus, Ohio, suburb of Upper Arlington. The Shops on Lane Avenue, managed by Madison Marquette, is a 200,000-square-foot combination open-air and enclosed specialty center. Its tenant roster includes the likes of Ann Taylor Loft, Pier 1 Imports and Wild Oats, but it also has a number of independents. “It’s a good location for us,” said John Gaylord, owner of Liberty Books & News. “I believe we’re also good for the shopping center, since we add something unique to the mix.” The store occupies about 9,500 square feet, considerably less than a typical big-box bookstore, but it carries roughly 90 percent of the titles a big box carries, says Gaylord. Though the store offers its patrons complementary coffee and cappuccino, it does not devote space to a café.

The store’s most distinctive feature is probably its print-on-demand selection of newspapers. The store has the equipment to print, on 11-by-17 paper, the entire contents — not just an Internet version — of any of about 400 daily and Sunday newspapers from around the world, as soon as the paper goes to press. “It’s an updated version of the kind of newsstands that used to carry scores of newspapers from all over,” said Gaylord. “We have customers who come in regularly for a specific paper.”

Retail Forward’s Whitfield posits that bookstores — strong independents and large chains alike — definitely have a place in lifestyle centers. “Bookstores are attractive tenants in the mix,” she said. “A lifestyle center isn’t about having a few destination anchors along with everyone else, like a regional mall. The lifestyle center is the destination. To the extent that you have a variety of retailers that provide interaction, such as a bookstore does when it offers readings or book clubs, that gives the added life to a lifestyle center.”

Some shopping center owners agree. “Bookstores are desirable tenants because of the cross traffic they can generate,” said Garo Kholamian, president of Barrington, Ill.-based GK Development. Certain smaller chains, such as Christian or children’s bookstores, fill a distinct niche that isn’t going away anytime soon, he says. “Even in some of the lifestyle centers that we’re developing,” said Mary Lou Fiala, president and COO of Regency Centers, “we consider the bookstores as key anchors. Not everyone is going to order every book off the Internet.”

This is not to say that the road ahead will be easy for independents or small chains, she says. “The habits of consumers are changing,” said Fiala. “Many bookstores will go out of business because, for whatever the reason, they fail to provide an experience that shoppers want. But the best bookstores are wonderful places to be, and they’re making the adjustments they need to survive.”