Join KUOW in celebrating public media this May, beginning with Public Media Giving Days, coming up May 1st and 2nd. Public Media Giving Days are a national effort to strengthen public media. Across the country, listeners like you give to power local news and stronger communities. Be one of the first to step up and support your local station. Give now at KUOW.org or the KUOW app. And thank you. music festivals and fan conventions art walks author events and reading parties the next few months are amazing for arts and culture in the seattle area and every week kuow's arts and culture podcast meet me here will give you the inside scoop from inspired recommendations to surprising chats with artists you'll discover what's truly special about seattle's creative communities. Listen to Meet Me Here on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when bookstores were an endangered species? Borders Books is starting its final chapter this weekend. After 40 years in business, Borders will shut its doors over the next two months. Well, not anymore. After years of bookstore closures and digital dominance, real books are back. Readers are rediscovering the joy of print. Thousands of independent bookstores across the country just celebrated Independent Bookstore Day. I'm here to get a book for my little sister because her birthday is coming up. I was taking the walk and I usually come by here to kill time. Did not know it was the Independent Bookstore Day. And now I'm doing a word search. Brick and mortar shops like Elliott Bay Books didn't just survive the e-commerce revolution. They're thriving by leaning into doing what online sellers can't do. Oh, I think being with other people who love books is contagious. I'm Monica Nicholsberg. I'm Joshua McNichols, and this is Booming. Today, how did independent bookstores escape Amazon's shadow? And what lessons could other businesses learn from their revival? That's coming up. Do you have any books by Dickens? No, no, I'm afraid we're a travel book shop. We only sell travel books. Oh, right. How about the new John Grisham thriller? Monica, I was recently in the Secret Garden bookstore in Ballard, and it was full of people. And I asked the manager how they're doing there, and she said they're doing pretty well. And then just down the street, there's a new romance bookstore that opened. Oh, yeah. Romance is very hot right now. So overall, I'm getting this vibe that physical bookstores are back. Yeah, I mean, it's not just a vibe. There's data to back this up. I talked to the American Booksellers Association, and they said that independent bookstore openings have been steadily increasing for the past few years. Like just last year, for example, more than 420 independent bookstores across the U.S. opened. And that was, I think, more than a 30% increase over the year before. It's a nationwide trend and one that we're seeing, especially here in the Pacific Northwest. It's pretty amazing considering where the industry was in the 1990s and the 2000s. I remember when it felt like independent bookstores were on the brink of extinction. Yeah. I mean, they'd already been struggling for years against these larger bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble. and then Amazon came along and nearly wiped everyone out. Yeah. So in 1994, the year Amazon opened, there were about 7,000 independent bookstores in the U.S. By 2009, that number had plummeted to 1,600. But last year, they were back up to nearly 3,000. And I met someone who's had a front row seat to this entire roller coaster. Who's that? Her name is Tracy Taylor. She's been with Elliott Bay Books in Seattle for more than 30 years, first as a general manager, and then in 2022, she became an owner. Oh, yeah. Elliott Bay goes way back in my personal history, too. It's iconic. When Tracy first joined Elliott Bay, it was still down in Pioneer Square. They had a coffee shop in the basement and customers would hang out there reading, writing in journals, maybe doing some work. And in the early 90s, they had a very unusual regular. When I first started, this bookstore was doing really well. We had a guy that was working downstairs in a cafe when I had my night shifts early on, who was putting together a bunch of spreadsheets and would come up and pick our brain about books and bookselling. He had this dream about opening a bookstore on the World Wide Web, which we didn't really know much about. We thought he was a little nutty. His questions weren't as much about books, but kind of about units sold. And we just don't talk about books in terms of units. We find them very precious, and we love to talk about books as books and titles and things that we love. So we just had no idea what was on the horizon. Obviously, he did. Any guess who that might have been? I have a guess, but I almost can't believe that it could be who I'm thinking of. It's Jeff Bezos. By 1994, we were feeling the full impacts of Amazon as Jeff Bezos, as it turned out to be, opened his online bookstore and people started buying books online. We probably wouldn't have refilled his coffee for free had we known. Amazon.com is never going to have any of that tactile stuff. We're never going to have any, you know, cafes or lattes or anything like that. But we can make Amazon.com every bit as fun and engaging as a good physical bookstore. It's just that it'll be different. He sounds so young in that archival footage. Yeah, yeah. We're going back into history here. You know what's crazy? Hearing that story about Jeff Bezos. I used to study in Elliott Bay as a college student. And it was probably about the time that Jeff Bezos was there. Oh my gosh. He could have been a customer who was sitting next to me. Yeah? So as we know now, the mid-90s saw the rise of Amazon and the continued expansion of Barnes & Noble and Borders. And that all took a bite out of the indie bookstore pie. Eventually, Amazon's success pushed out some of the big box booksellers too. It was also really hard on small bookstores like Elliott Bay. They had many years where they were just struggling to break even. And then the Great Recession hit in 2008. We really began looking for either to move the store or close the store And those were a hard couple of years They did decide to move from Pioneer Square to their current location in Capitol Hill And that really changed everything for them. In 2010, we made the leap. We brought the cedar shelves with us. It's from old growth cedar, built in 1973. What we didn't have down in Pioneer Square back in 2008, 2009, and 2010 were customers. And the day that we opened here, April 2010, we had a line that went around the block of people trying to get in the store who were so excited to see us move to this neighborhood. And it's just been a source of joy ever since. What do you attribute that difference to? I think moving to a place where people live just made a huge difference. difference. I think this story really gets at one of the reasons that we're seeing this indie bookstore revival today. Okay, what is it? Well, they've really become a part of the fabric of people's neighborhoods in a way that online booksellers and even the bigger bookstores just can't. And Tracy says that this was more apparent than ever during the pandemic. What happened was just an outpouring of support. Sales came in online. We learned how to be online booksellers in a very different way almost overnight. You know, we don't discount books. The price of the book is the retail price that the publisher suggests. So that's always been a little bit tough when you're competing against a behemoth like Amazon. So we've always known that people choose to buy their books here, and they choose it for a whole lot of different reasons. When they started buying online, it was a choice to be supporting their neighborhood bookstore. This kind of explains a little bit why some chains like Barnes & Noble is trying to get into neighborhoods now. Like they took over the university bookstore in the U District here and that is a neighborhood bookstore. Yeah. And Barnes & Noble is interesting because part of their newfound success is in learning from what independent bookstores do and giving local managers more control over curation and kind of taking a page from the indie bookstore book. Wow. Yeah. And these smaller bookstores during the pandemic worked really hard to care for their customers because they knew that they were choosing to spend a little bit more money with them. And so they tried to provide something that the cheaper online booksellers couldn't. Tracy told me about the first Mother's Day during COVID. The store was closed and they realized that their customers didn't have a way to buy a Mother's Day card. And they couldn't just sell single cards online. So they started putting together these little gift boxes and then there would be one card inside. What we didn't expect were the notes that people wanted us to write on their cards for their mothers. And so another bookseller and I spent days writing these cards out to people's mothers about how they missed the birth of their first grandchild, how they missed having coffee with their mother every day, how much their mothers meant to them, how they hadn't seen them for months. They were just, they broke our hearts and both of us had lost our mothers. So it was sort of this catharsis to write all these cards for all of these people in Seattle who are missing their mothers. It was really beautiful. You know, this sounds like a more personalized version of something that all kinds of businesses were trying during the pandemic. You know, I remember covering theaters that tried to send out little boxes so that you could experience a theatrical production on your phone, but have like a little snack with you that the theater had produced. Yeah, I mean, it was a time when we realized what an important role the arts and culture businesses played in our lives once they were missing. Yeah, but it sounds like that worked better for bookstores, I guess. Yeah, and customers rewarded independent bookstores for that kind of personal care. And then when things started opening back up, people flocked to their neighborhood bookstores in search of another thing that's hard to get online, community. That's what we found at Seattle's Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday. Elliott Bay was flooded with book lovers, and they were browsing the shelves, doing crossword puzzles and other activities that the store put on. And we asked them, why choose to shop at a bookstore in person instead of just buying the book online, even when the online book might be cheaper? I think that it's all about the vibe. Like, I just like being in these spaces. Reading is a pretty isolated hobby. and so you know seeing other people that have same interests as you is pretty cool it just helps build community there's something special about just getting all of the personal suggestions from from folks especially just as you look around you can see how how much care the people here put into recommending things so it's sort of thing which you can't get by shopping online or at one of the big stores it just feels better and also i like looking at all the covers. I can totally relate to that. When I was recently in a bookstore, I ended up buying three books that I hadn't planned on buying, and they were all recommended by those little cards from staff. Totally. This story has cost me a lot. I should not have agreed to it without some sort of a KUOW stipend. So Monica, we've been talking about the surge of independent bookstores. Are there lessons here for other businesses? I think so. I mean, the biggest one is just don't try to beat Amazon at their own game. They've got a lot of advantages in that game. Bookstores, they know their customers so well. I mean, they think about specific customers when they're deciding what books to stock. And their employees handwrite those recommendations from the heart. They found these things that their customers care about and leaned into them. And that won't look the same for every business, but I do think that the businesses that can find their equivalent will have the most success. So it's inspiring to hear all these stories of these indie stores doing OK, even thriving. But not all of them are. Some of my favorite bookstores have closed in the last few years, even in the middle of this revival. Like just recently, Ada's Technical Books on Capitol Hill announced that it was closing. Yeah, I saw that. I have fond memories of taking my son there when he was asking for books on coding that a middle schooler would understand. And that bookstore always seemed to be full of people and the bookstore hosted events. And so it appeared to have a strong community. How do you explain closures like that? Yeah I mean I didn talk to Ada for this story but I saw online that the owner said the closure was more about spending time with family and not a reflection of how things are going in that location But more broadly even in the best of times bookselling is a tough business Nobody gets into it for the money They have incredibly slim margins, like restaurants, and there are always closures and then new ones pop up to take their place. Ada replaced an old bookstore. And the folks that I did interview for this story are still nervous about all of this. Tracy said they're starting to see a little bit of a slump as customers are becoming more and more uneasy about where the economy is headed. There are just no guarantees. But what's impressive about this moment is despite all of that, we're still seeing steady net growth of independent bookstores in the Pacific Northwest and everywhere. And it's happening at a time when a lot of other businesses are seeing their revenues shrink and their profits take a hit. Interesting. So we know that connecting in person is important and meeting customers where they're at, also online, is also important. But it still leaves me wondering, why now? I mean, most of these trends have been going on for a while. Is there anything else at work in the economy that might also be contributing to this revival that we're seeing right now? Well, it's hard to prove. But one thing that Tracy said has just I just keep thinking about it and going back to it. She mentioned during our conversation that a lot of the most iconic indie bookstores that we know and love opened between 1970 and 1973. Like which ones? Powell's in Portland, the Tattered Cover in Denver, Book People in Austin, and of course, Elliott Bay here in Seattle. And there are a lot of similarities between what was happening in the economy during that time. And now I mean, inflation was high driven by an oil embargo. The labor market was kind of stalled. There was a lot of economic uncertainty. Okay, so is there a relationship there? It's hard to say. I couldn't really find any strong data to make the case. The American Booksellers Association doesn't have data going back that far, and neither does the Federal Reserve, which tracks book sales. And obviously, what happened in 2008 shows that bookstores aren't recession-proof by any means. But it did make me wonder whether there's a little bit of the lipstick effect happening here. Do you know what that is? All I can think of is the phrase putting lipstick on a pig. It's not that. OK. The lipstick effect is this economic theory that consumer spending on more affordable luxuries, think lipstick, not handbags, actually sometimes goes up during economic downturns, even as overall consumer spending goes down. The idea being that people need a little pick me up when times are tough. And so if it's a relatively affordable one, they might be more likely to buy it. Okay, so you think the same thing is true for books? I mean, it makes intuitive sense to me. Who doesn't want to escape into a cozy mystery or fantasy when things are feeling really tough overall in the world? And a book can be a more affordable treat than taking your family out for a meal, which is something we've reported on that's in decline. I this might be a stretch, but I wonder if the bookstore rebound that we're seeing today is also a reaction to the rise of technologies like AI, which a lot of people find scary. I've been thinking about that, too. All I can say is for me personally, I went through this period after my kids were born where I wasn't reading as much. And I felt a little out of touch with my humanity, to be honest. I mean, sometimes when you're just scrolling all the time, it feels like you just exist to feed these technologies with your data and your privacy and now increasingly with AI, with just prompting. and putting all of that down and working a practice in where I just read every night really turned that around for me and I have to think other people are experiencing that too I mean we're having all of these conversations right now about humanity right about what it means to be human as these technologies are getting more and more adept at at least mimicking human intelligence and the answer for me always comes back to books I mean I really think they're one of the greatest things humanity has ever created. It's like this experiment in radical empathy, where you are handing yourself over to someone else's mind and experience who has nothing to do with you just for the love of a good story. And I don't know, I think that the answer to that question, what does it mean to be human? It's not that hard to answer if you read a lot of books. Well, thanks for bringing us this story. It was a pleasure. One of my favorite ones to do. Coming up next, The Endgame. Be one of the first to step up and support your local station. Give now at KUOW.org or the KUOW app. And thank you. I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. We all remember this song. It made it all seem so simple. And turns out it's not. Who writes, influences, and kills bills? It gets messy. I'm Scott Greenstone. And I'm Libby Denkman. On Sound Politics, we tell that story. the inside track on how policy gets made in this Washington and the other one, and how it impacts you. Listen now on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back for the end game, and we've got our producer, Lucy Suchek. Hi. Hi. Happy to be here. Okay, so this isn't really a game. It's just kind of a fun discussion about books. But basically, I went to Elliott Bay Books for Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, and I got to talk to lots of readers about what they're reading now and what they want to read next. So I want to hear from you guys what you're reading now and what you want to read next. But first I want to share some tape that I got. Can't wait to hear it. Okay here's what brought Kat to Elliott Bay for Indie Bookstore Day. My favorite author is John Saul so anything by him that I haven't read is really what I'm looking for but he's hard to find because he's you know from like the 70s and a lot of independent stores don't sell or have his products anymore. But right now I'm going to be starting a book that I actually got for free here for Independent Bookstore Day called How to Survive Camping, The Lady in Chains. That was a really fun thing that was going on was the blind date with a book. So ever so often they would come up and you crowded around and there were these books that were wrapped in like brown paper and they would describe the book and then you raise your hand if you think that that book is something that you want to read And then they just gave them out for free Sweet A real moment to not judge a book by its cover Exactly Yeah. All right. Who else did you hear from? I heard from Lars. I like to read the Wild Robot. I'm about in the middle of that. Do you know the Wild Robot? Yes. Lars has amazing taste. Yeah. Wild Robot is such a sweet story. The movie is really, really beautiful, too. We watch it a lot in my house. I should check it out. Yeah, I read that to my kids when they were little, I think. Okay, I also heard from Laura. I just finished reading Hail Mary because I'm one of those people that feels very strongly that you read a book before you watch the movie. And then you probably don't watch the movie because you love the book so much. I have been wanting to read Project Hail Mary before I saw the movie. I didn't see it in theaters, and it's still on my list. I've done both, and I loved both. Me too. I think everybody's trying to do this. So the wait from Libby is like 10 years. But I agree with Laura and I get a lot of anxiety when an adaptation is coming out and I haven't read the book because even the trailers, it means that I'm going to be influenced about like what the characters are going to look like. Yeah. One of the worst decisions of my life was to watch Gone Girl without having read the book. And I still read the book after and the entire time I was just like, this would be amazing if I didn't know it was going to happen. Okay, and then last one I want to share is Carl. I'm currently reading a book called Riding Uphill in the Rain, which is about the history of Seattle biking. So that's a bit of an odd one, but I'm also very, very excited for an upcoming humorous mystery book, Everyone in This Bank is a Thief. I should read that one because I used to be a bicycle courier in downtown Seattle. I did not know that. Yeah. I didn't know that either. Yeah, it was one of my weird jobs. One time I jumped off the curb in front of Bill Clinton's motorcade during this major like oil summit thing in downtown Seattle. Joshua, you have lived so many lives. I got yelled at so bad for that. Okay, real quick. I want to hear from you two. What are you reading now and what do you want to read next? Okay. I actually brought the book I'm reading now. It's called The Last Town on Earth. It's historical fiction, and it's about this sort of utopian labor-based lumber town called Commonwealth that's northeast of Seattle. And they get cut off from civilization when the Spanish flu is knocking all these other communities out. And they set up a barricade and don't let anybody in. It's really fascinating. really good let me see that book yeah here it's by thomas mullen toss it to me let's see how i can get oh terrible well she's a reader not an athlete i want to read this yeah it's good you can borrow it after i'm done okay i usually read two to four books at a time because i'm insane so i right now i'm reading sea of tranquility by emily st john mandel who also wrote station 11 oh yeah and i just picked up yesteryear by carol clare that's on my list i really want to read that oh my gosh it's i'm only a few pages in but the voice is just so captivating it's you can see why it's a sensation the voice of the author oh no the voice of the narrator yeah is this a time travel thing the yeah the premise of yesteryear is a trad wife influencer wakes up in the 1800s in a real farmhouse and has to do this life that she has been performing for social media sounds like the Outlander series. Yeah, a little bit, which I also love. Yeah. And I want to read, well, in preparation for this, I was just looking at my holds on Libby, and it's a little out of control. But I think the things I will read next, among the many books that I want to read, are Fame Sick, Lena Dunham's new memoir, I Came of Age During the Girls Era, and I've heard it's really good. And I still haven't read Michael Pollan's new book, A World Appears, and he's one of my favorite nonfiction authors. So those will probably be my next two. For my next book, I want to read Martyr by Kaveh Akbar. And I've been looking at this book in bookstores forever, but I picked it up just recently and read the first line and it was like, oh man, a great first line. What is it? Do you remember what it was? Well, I pulled it up here on my screen on my phone. It says, maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order or the right drugs in the wrong order. But when God finally spoke back to him after 27 years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do over. Wow. Excellent. Yeah. Very well done. First lines are such an art. I would read a book of just first lines. Yes. Great books. Yeah. How about you, Lucy? Are you going to share what you're reading and what you want to read? So I'm reading I just started the factory by Hiroko Oyamada. That's for my book club. It's giving severance a little bit. It follows three different workers at an industrial factory commentary on the modern workplace, that kind of thing. The factory was written and published in Japan in 2013 and then translated to English in like 2019. And I'm also reading Green Crime Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them by Julia Shaw. This is for another podcast I work on, The Wild. I want to interview her to talk about ecocides and people who commit environmental crimes. All right, listeners, what are you reading and what do you want to read? Send us an email at booming at KUOW.org. We would love some more recommendations. And if you are a serious book lover, you should also know that KUOW has a book club, which you can find at KUOW.org. That's it for Booming. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a story idea or just want to connect, we always love to hear from our listeners. So feel free to email us at booming at KUOW.org or leave us a voicemail at 206-221-7158. And if you've donated to the show and a few of you have, thank you for that. If you want to be a donor and join these people who are supporting us, go to KUOW.org slash booming and you can donate there. Thanks. Our producers are Lucy Suchek, who went to Indie Bookstore Day this year, and Alec Cowan. Our editor is Carol Smith, author of a published memoir. Go check that out, too. I'm Monica Nicholsberg. I'm Joshua McNichols. And we'll see you next time. Seattle restaurants are closing. Costs are high. But the newest restaurants are pushing ahead with ambitious ideas anyway. I'm Brandi Fullwood, host of Seattle Eats. And on the latest episode, we plug in to the pop-ups going permanent, the tasting menus serving up hard-to-find seafood, and all the newest places you must try. Listen to Seattle Eats on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.
