War of the Words : Rise of the Indie Bookstore

Amazon started as an online bookstore. And now they rule the world.

Or so we thought.

Beneath three decades of dominance, we've grown accustomed to the sight of businesses shuttering as a result of Amazon's titanic reign in world market. From price to convenience, the tech giant has made it all too easy to ignore the business next to your house in deference to a package on your doorstep. But recent movement in the world of literature is indicating that maybe the time of Mom and Pop Shops isn’t gone for good.

Bezos began Amazon in 1995 selling books by mail to customers out of his garage. You’ve most likely seen the photo. A much younger Jeff sitting at a folding table working hard on his computer. Behind him is a pathetic white banner touting the black painted letters of his company name. You have to respect it. He had a vision and he stuck to it. I’m sure bookstores laughed at him at first. They weren’t laughing for long.

By the late nineties the number of brick and mortar bookstores was dropping by the thousands. By the 2010’s even larger players began to shutter and by 2015 when renown book chains Borders and Waldenbooks turned the page for good, we thought the end had come. What stood in the way between bibliophiles and a total online takeover of the literature world was Barnes & Noble and handful of dwindling book shops scattered across America. And the small indie shops were losing ground fast.

Brick and mortar bookstores went from nearly 20,000 locations nationwide to an endangered 6,000 or so by 2019. Most of that ground was held by chains such as Barnes & Noble and Books a Million.

But then something happened. The online world gave birth to both death and life at once. The same black magic that destroyed bookstores with the rise of Amazon now uttered a miracle of revival in the egg of social media. Social media…and one little virus.

2020 brought the entire globe to a screeching halt. Millions of Americans found themselves cooperating with an increasing list of restrictions in where they could go. And so they went where they could. After a while that didn’t leave much. But it did leave one place : online. Millions of people began sharing everyday life, everyday habits, everyday reads. The same machine that hamstrung a generation of kids with poor mental health and reading scores also sparked the book community into sharing their love of reading. Booktok, Bookstagram, Books Lovers and other groups spread like wildfire across TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, igniting a new generation of readers and also writers.

In the 1990's the barrier to entry for aspiring authors was monumental. There was very little chance of proving salability to a publisher beforehand. Agencies were few and far in between. Even independent publishing was a niche market. Formatting the book was mostly out the question due to the technology of the time. With the rise of the internet world, that began to change. Anyone with an idea and some spare time could put together a book and release it through the new invention of 'print to order' publishing. Writers could now work off of Word or Google Docs, run through edits and format their work all by themselves. They could skip right past the nose-turning book agents and publishers and go straight to self-publish platforms without spending much of a dime. It's ironic that the biggest player in this game was Amazon through its branch of Kindle Direct Publishing. Independent authors and self published work went from a few thousand per year to breaking two million in the year 2026.

Voices in literature began to sprout like Spring flowers and with the growing demand for books, a new desire in the public began to rise. Or maybe it was an old one. It was the desire for something that had been taken away by the online world : atmosphere. We missed the sight of walls and walls of books. We missed the smell of coffee laced with thousands of pages under warm yellow light. We missed kiosks filled with hundreds of unique bookmarks and workers who were passionate about the store they worked in because they were fellow readers themselves. We missed exploring a physical universe beneath our fingertips and finding new worlds between every cover we held in our hands. And bookstores noticed. They ramped up 'blind date with a book' and 'indie book crawls' and built up their social media presence. They took their books on the road in 'by mobile bookstores' and set up Little Free Libraries. They lifted up independent authors for book signings and events. They leaning into their small size by fitting neatly into the community demands for unique genres of work. They leaned into family atmospheres and cozy nooks.

And at long last, after nearly a generation of frightening decline, Amazon is staring down the barrel of a genuine contender for their market share.

What looked like a death spiral of a dwindling 1,500 independent bookstores has since nearly doubled in an Indie Revival. Recent data shows an estimated 2,500 locations nationwide outside of mainstream stores. The Reading Renaissance has thus begun and with it, the war for market share doesn't seem so much like a one sided fight. And you, the reader, can help choose the winner. Every book you buy from a local store gives precious life, not just to the dream of a small business owner but to the environment of learning and literature in the community. You have the power to affect that.

Amazon will never die. They're too big for that. They've earned their perpetual place at the capitalist table and I tip my hat to them. Bezos ran through walls nobody knew existed to get his billions. But as for me and my house, we'll celebrate the Mom and Pop store. We'll let our kids walk excitedly through rows and rows of books while I talk to owners and ask how the store is doing. We'll make weekend trips to our local spot, bask in the atmosphere of literature and celebrate a beautiful thing our community enjoys: a good bookstore.

Long live the Indie Bookshop.

Written by Michael Hernandez