Brick-and-mortar bookstores are back

In a 500-square-foot storefront in Fresno, Ashley Mireles-Guerrero built something she couldn't find growing up in California’s agricultural Central Valley: a place where the shelves were filled with books that spoke to her.

Her store, Judging by the Cover, opened as a vendor market pop-up in 2023. Then, as now, it focuses on BIPOC- and LGBTQ-centered books and stocks bilingual titles in Spanish, Punjabi, and Hmong. Titles, she said, that were hard to find in Fresno.

"One of our first pop-up events, we had an elder who said they've never seen themselves represented in books before, ever," Mireles-Guerrero said. "Growing up as a Latina, there weren't a lot of stories that represent us."

Today, Judging by the Cover is one of roughly 3,400 members of the American Booksellers Association — up from fewer than 2,000 just five years ago. Last year alone, the trade group counted more than 600 new independent bookstore openings nationwide, the most since the 1990s.

Ask booksellers, customers and executives why, and one word keeps surfacing: community.

At Judging by the Cover, customers describe the pull in similar terms. Tabitha Dubois, a regular, called it "such a connecting point," crediting the store's events with helping her join book clubs and meet neighbors. "The money you spend in the community supports the community," she said.

Even Barnes & Noble has taken the lesson to heart, scrapping its old one-size-fits-all model — including publisher-paid placement — in favor of letting individual store teams choose what lands on the front table.

"It's allowed each of them to kind of breathe into the type of bookstore they want to be," said Shannon Devito, head of books at Barnes & Noble. The chain, which spent much of the 2010s closing stores, added 60 locations last year and plans to open at least that many again this year.

"Everyone is yearning for brick and mortar and finding places where they can go to be a part of the community," she said. "A bookstore is kind of the automatic center of that."

It's a striking reversal for an industry that, a decade ago, appeared to be in terminal decline — squeezed first by large chains, then by Amazon, then e-books, which some feared would empty brick-and-mortar shelves entirely.

"Sometimes, a good year would be 60 new bookstores, or we only lost 30," said John Mutter, co-founder of the trade newsletter Shelf Awareness, who has covered bookselling for decades. Now his publication runs so many opening stories — especially a steady stream of romance-focused shops — Mutter must space them out just to give each one its moment.

Industry insiders trace the turnaround to the pandemic, when stores that couldn't let customers through the door reinvented themselves out of necessity — running curbside pickup lines, making home deliveries, and embracing online sales through platforms like Bookshop.org, which launched in 2020 and now funnels a share of every sale back to independent shops.

Mireles-Guerrero said her own store's Bookshop.org page now accounts for roughly 20% of sales, helping her reach book clubs as far as 200 miles away across California's sprawling farm country. Her store also hosts free community events that regularly draw 50 to 200 people, she said. This summer, outgrowing its original space, it moved to a larger location.