Come What May, Indie Bookstores are Here to Stay
Walk down towards the intersection of 165th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Washington Heights and you can’t miss it. A sign ‘Word Up Community Bookstore’ painted in white against a bold red background greets the incoming visitor. Once in, it’s hard not to spend some time catching up on some of your favorite titles.
(Veronica Liu of Word Up Community Bookstore, Photo: Ravie Lakshmanan)
Run fully by a group of unpaid volunteers, Word Up is a used community bookstore run by Veronica Santiago Liu. As Liu puts, it’s a store for the community made possible by the community. Originally intended to be a one-month literary fair, the pop-up store opened at 176 Street Broadway in June 2011.
But the neighborhood supported the idea of a reading space so much so that the place was leased for the next one year. Following the termination of the lease in August 2012, Liu and her volunteer collective raised over $70,000 via a successful Indiegogo campaign before moving to their current location.
In times like today, when ebooks and Kindles have taken over, it’s perhaps a given to assume independent bookstores cannot outlast companies like Amazon for long. But the fact is, they are. And they have become an indispensable part of the community they serve.
“The journey (of opening the store and running it) has been amazing,” said Liu. “Books are a good meeting point, and the store has always been an accessible space for the community. It makes a solitary activity like reading into a social one. It’s the people who are making this happen.”
Some popular stores in New York City like The Strand need no introduction. Same goes for The Mysterious Bookshop on Warren Street in downtown Manhattan. Owned by famous mystery fiction editor Otto Penzler, it’s the oldest mystery bookshop in the country.
“Specializing in just one genre helps,” said Steve Viola, 49, on asking what keeps the business going at the store. “Plus the owner of the store is really well-known in the field. And we have the largest Sherlock Holmes collection in the world. All these go into making the place special.”
But with the younger generation gravitating more towards ebooks, thanks to the proliferation of Kindles, tablets and smartphones, have indie bookstores come under pressure? “We have our bad days but we are usually pretty lively. We have a very loyal customer base, and we get a fair amount of walk-in traffic as well because of its closeness to the World Trade Center,” adds Mr. Viola. “And we have online sales too. So I don’t think Amazon has affected us quite that much.”
Merchandising is not their cup of tea either. “Mysteries are what we sell. And that’s what we will do,” said Mr. Viola. But Chris Doeblin, who runs Book Culture along with Annie Hedrick on 112 Street for about 20 years, has been experimenting with this hybrid model in one of their newest locations near 81st Street Columbus Avenue.
“This bookstore is very close to an academic university (Columbia), so we differentiate ourselves by having a very broad range of scholarly titles, and also by seeking support from the university to sell course books to students,” said Doeblin. “We have also deviated and created a new store model which has more non-book products. So we are creating a hybrid bookstore experience where books are about 70 percent of what we sell.”
Mr. Doeblin admits that all of this is not easy work. “Expansion is a little difficult,” he said. “It’s relatively easy to carry out your duties in one bookshop. But you need to have enough foundation, and the capacity to raise enough money and be successful enough to build trust and slingshot yourself into another location. But it’s really the same process of running a bookstore all over again.”
Probe him about the prevailing trend of ebooks, Mr. Doeblin said,”The ebook phenomenon didn’t really affect us, however the digitization of books affected the way students use books enormously. The number of books purchased by college students for each class has declined precipitously.”
Soon enough though, indie bookstores in the city will have a new rival to contend with — Amazon. Decades after selling books and ebooks at low prices and putting several physical bookstores like Borders out of business, the technology company is planning to open a brick-and-mortar store in Hudson Yards, Manhattan in late 2018 or early 2019.
“CD stores have totally disappeared and so has all the cash that used to flow back to the artists. People now will have to tour. It’s a similar trend with Amazon,” Doeblin said. “There’s certainly going to be competition. But it’s hard to say how much it’s going to affect us. I hope they don’t have any plans to open up a huge group of unprofitable discount stores because it’s hard enough already.”
For Word Up, the big challenge hasn’t been so much about Amazon as the stability of its business. As a non-profit initiative serving a relatively low-income neighborhood when compared to other parts of Manhattan, used books are sold anywhere between a dollar to five. But Liu says demand for new titles are growing steadily. “The more we are around, the more people want from us. Which is great,” said Liu with a laugh.
“Amazon hasn’t been a huge issue for us. We are primarily a used bookstore,” she said. “I know that Amazon has a ton of used books but when you add the shipping it costs more than what it would to buy the book from us. We sell books at unusually low price points when compared to other New York City stores. We want it to be accessible to most of the people in the neighborhood.”
That said, Liu admits there have been discussions with other independent booksellers about Amazon’s entry into the city. “We have been talking if this is really going to be an issue. None of us would want to spend money to open a store in Hudson Yards anyway,” she said. “But it would be something if Amazon imposes a lockdown like pre-order this book and buy a ticket to this event at our store all in one click.”
Liu, a mother to a fourteen-month old Lester, currently works part-time in the City Department of Cultural Affairs but says it’s her passion to devote her time fully towards the bookstore by next year. She is equally appreciative of the efforts her group puts into the day-to-day operations, pausing in between to jokingly ask Hannah (a high-school senior and fellow volunteer) about the time she puts in every week. (It’s 50 hours.)
“Everyone who works here is a volunteer,” said Liu. “Everyone here has gathered specifically in order to make this neighborhood space something that they themselves would want to go to. So the phrase run by the community for the community is completely true for Word Up.”
