Independent Bookselling: Struggles and Bad News

As discussed in detail on Ed Nawotka’s blog, Paperback Dreams is a documentary coming out this fall that focuses on the struggles of two West Coast independent bookstores: Kepler’s and Cody’s.

The film, which will run on PBS stations starting in November, begins with the opening of Kepler’s near Stanford University in 1955, documents Andy Ross’s purchase of Cody’s in 1977 and follows the impact of the Internet age of the late 1990s. It ends with the closing of Cody’s San Francisco location and a depiction of Kepler’s ongoing struggles to remain open.

In producing this, filmmaker Alex Beckstead came up with four survival principles for bookstores:

1. Own your own building.

2. Hire experienced staff.

3. Sell used books.

4. Figure out some way to sell books online.

I wonder if other booksellers would agree with these . . . The first sounds like a no-brainer, and is one of the causes for so many New York bookstores going under over the past few years. (Such as Lenox Hill, Coliseum, Gotham, etc., etc.)

It’s sort of sadly ironic to post this today though, after reading this item in Publishers Weekly:

Cody’s Books, the one-time iconic Berkeley, Calif. bookstore that has fallen on hard times in recent years, has closed. In an e-mail sent late Friday, Cody’s management said the store “will shut its doors effective June 20.”