For the past 16 years, Port In A Storm bookstore was a literary fixture in the Mount Desert Island village of Sommesville. Housed in a building once used to re-supply Atlantic sailing cargo ships, it sat across the dam from the Sommesville Library; the two buildings served as literary bookends in the heart of the village.
But on January 18, Port In A Storm closed for good. Owner Jan Coates cited increased competition from the Internet and big box stores and a general decrease in reading as her reasons for closing. The decision, which left her five part-time workers without work, came after several years of careful analysis of the bookselling industry and many creative attempts to stay economically viable.
Since she announced the closing, Coates has received an outpouring of e-mails and letters from grieving booklovers.
“It’s both heartwarming and heartbreaking,” she said.
Carl Little was one of the store’s biggest fans. As a writer and an islander, he said the closing is both a personal loss for him and a loss for the community. The bookstore hosted numerous book publicity events for him and no other bookstore has sold as many of his books, he said. It also provided texts for community reads projects, and Coates helped to found a separate non-profit that organizes school-wide reads and author sessions with several Maine islands.
“I think it’s a major blow,” Little said. “It’s just been such a terrific meeting place for everybody.”
Port in A Storm isn’t the only independent bookstore that has closed recently in New England, said Steve Fischer, executive director for the New England Independent Booksellers Association (NEIBA). Fischer estimated that some 10 percent of association bookstores have closed in the last year.
Fischer believes the tough retail climate brought on by the worldwide recession is having an obvious trickle-down effect on bookstores. Not only are people spending less, but landlords are pushing some bookstores out in favor of more profitable ventures.
Meanwhile, industry changes are exacerbating the problem for independent booksellers. Over the past decade, independents have seen their market share shrink to some 6 percent to 10 percent of total national book sales, according to studies. Big-box stores have muscled smaller stores out of the market-share, many publishers are starting to sell their books directly and online booksellers are taking an increasing chunk of the bookselling business. Even though online retailers actually suffered a rare drop in sales over the recent holiday season, it wasn’t as bad a drop as brick and mortar retailers suffered.
“When you’re crunched for Christmas gifts, you turn on your computer,” Fischer said.
Independent booksellers often are facing fierce direct competition from big-box booksellers, sometimes positioned no more than a few hundred feet apart. In fall of 2008, the Brunswick-based Bookland, after 34 years in Cook’s Corner shopping center, closed after a Borders chain-store moved into town. The closing meant the loss of 20 jobs.
Gary Lawless, co-owner of Gulf of Maine books, the only independent bookstore left standing in the Brunswick area, believes Bookland was targeted by the chain store. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make business sense for Borders to open just as the city’s Air Force base was closing. “I’m not sure the Brunswick Borders is a very successful store,” he said.
Suzan Steer, an investor and buyer for Bookland, said Bookland was more impacted by increased competition from online retailers like Amazon.com than brick and mortar big-box stores like Borders, especially since online companies don’t pay the same taxes as Bookland did.
“Amazon is far more toxic to local independent bookstores,” she said. Still, Steer acknowledges, the bookstore’s owners decided to open a store in Rockland mainly because of the planned Borders. And she says she felt a sense of dread when she noticed the latest Harry Potter book at sale at a CVS pharmacy.
The Rockland expansion store initially prospered until the national economic slowdown dampened the book-buying market. Ultimately, the store proved a drain on Bookland’s resources. Bookland’s owners, with decades of book-building experience, had dealt with bad retail climates in the past and assumed they could survive this downturn, said Steer. But they weren’t prepared for the severity of the recession, and the debt from the Rockland expansion sunk the company.
“We thought we’d weather the storm and things would just get better,” Steer said. “It was simply bad timing.”
In the last year, even Borders experienced significant financial trouble. Hemorrhaging money, the chain store searched in vain for a buyer to shore up its bottom line and reported its worst earnings in company history in the third quarter of 2008. Financial analysts believe the store is suffering from increased bookselling competition by even-bigger box stores like Wal-Mart and Target.
There seems to be no one recipe for survival for independent booksellers. With Port in A Storm, Coates had strong community backing and an ideal location to attract vacationing booklovers, but it was not enough to sustain her throughout the year. Bookland attempted expansion to remain viable. Gulf of Maine books, however, started small and stayed small.
Lawless says he tries hard not to have any debt at the end of the year, even if it means passing on opportunities. He says the bookstore is geared toward an extremely local niche market, as well. Aside from a section of poetry, Lawless’s literary weakness, the store mainly stocks Maine-interest books. “We don’t even try to sell the bestsellers,” he said. “Our bestselling book this year is Forest Trees of Maine.”
Lawless is in a position to offer a unique perspective to the bookselling industry. As a bookseller, he doesn’t hide his dislike for big-box stores, but he’s also a book publisher who regularly networks with giant sellers like Amazon.com and Borders to get his authors the best market. Having spent more than a quarter-century in the bookselling industry and seen his share of economic downturns, he remains hopeful for the future of independent booksellers.
“It’s evolution. I don’t think the sky’s falling; the season may be changing,” he said.
NEIBA director Fischer doesn’t believe the sky is falling, either. But he says the only way independent bookstores can survive is if community-members support them financially instead of pointing and clicking at Amazon.com. If a community enjoys the literary meeting place that an independent bookstore provides, the community members need to show their support with their dollars, he said.
“It’s very much like National Public Radio to me,” Fischer said. “You really need to contribute.”