Against All Predictions, Independent Bookshops Are Winning
The last time someone told me Amazon had definitively won the book trade, I was standing in an independent bookshop in Seville, waiting for my card to go through on a forty-two euro order. That was 2021. The shop is still there.
New figures suggest the broader story may be less settled than the obituaries implied. Bookshop.org — the platform that routes online sales to independent retailers rather than a warehouse in New Jersey — reported 55 percent revenue growth in 2025, driven partly by a surge in romance readers and, perhaps unexpectedly, ebooks. The American Booksellers Association is calling this year's Independent Bookstore Day, falling on April 25, "the largest celebration yet," with more than a thousand participating shops across the United States.
None of this means Amazon is worried. Amazon is constitutionally incapable of worry; it simply adjusts. But the idea that the independent bookshop was a dying form — a charming anachronism, like the cheesemonger or the family-run hardware shop — appears to have been one of those confident predictions that reality declined to ratify.
What Bookshop.org did, and what keeps indie shops alive more broadly, is something algorithms still can't replicate: the recommendation that comes from someone who has actually read the book. You can train a machine to surface what people who bought this also bought, but you cannot yet train it to remember that a particular customer came back three times in a year to thank the bookseller for a suggestion that changed how they thought. That transaction — unhurried, imprecise, faintly absurd — is apparently worth something.
The growth in ebook sales through Bookshop.org is interesting precisely because it challenges the assumption that digital reading and independent bookselling are mutually exclusive. They are not. What independent bookselling sells, it turns out, is not just a physical object but a relationship with a curated supply of things worth reading. Whether that arrives on paper or on a screen is, for a growing number of readers, a secondary question.
The last time the independent bookshop was declared finished, in the early 2000s, the response was a decade of quiet consolidation, new models, and the stubborn persistence of people who decided that selling books was worth doing badly for a while until it was worth doing well. History, in this particular industry, has a habit of rhyming with itself.
