REMAINDERS

Why do bookstores still exist?

- LOUIS MENAND

The pandemic wasn’t good for much, but it was good for bookstores. Exactly how good is a little hard to measure. For all sorts of reasons, the data on book sales, bookstores, and most things bookish are notoriously inexact. Not only is there no settled definition of what counts as a bookstore; there is no settled definition of what counts as a book.

If I self-publish a book and sell it on my Web site, is that a real book? And am I a bookstore? If we think that, to be “real,” a book must have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), we are faced with the fact that the ISBN of a hardcover book is different from the ISBNs of the paperback, audio, and digital editions of the same book. Are these all counted separately? The Bible is a book. So are “Pickleball for Dummies,” “Spanking Zelda,” “Pat the Bunny,” and “The Big Book of Sudoku.” When we ask how many Americans read books, are those the kinds of books we have in mind?

According to Kristen McLean, an industry analyst, two-thirds of the books released by the top-ten trade publishers sell fewer than a thousand copies, and less than four per cent sell more than twenty thousand. Still, it’s generally agreed that book sales rose after 2019 and that, since the end of the pandemic, there has been a small but significant uptick in the number of independent bookstores. Explaining the first bump seems simple enough. Reading turned out to be a popular way of passing the time in lockdown, more respectable than binge-watching or other diversions one might think of. A slight decline in sales over the past couple of years suggests that people felt freed up to go out and play pickleball instead of staying home and trying to finish “War and Peace.”