Local bookstore thriving in wake of pandemic

Andy Knight, The Herald Bulletin, Anderson, Ind.
·2 min read

Aug. 10—ANDERSON — At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, health and safety precautions prompted Ginger Mills to close her bookstore, The Book Nook, for 10 weeks.

Once she reopened her storefront in the Southdale Plaza off 53rd Street, Mills said, she noticed an immediate difference in the buying habits of some of her customers. Instead of bringing an armful of books to the counter for purchase, many would pile dozens of works into the store's shopping carts.

"They came in to be prepared for the long haul, if we got shut down again," Mills said. "People were depending on books for their free time activities — they couldn't go to movies, they couldn't go to ballgames — but they could read."

That interest, it seems, has only intensified over the last two years. Mills and other book shop owners across the country have seen an unexpected boom in sales since pandemic-related restrictions began to gradually loosen early last year. Indie book sales in the first quarter of 2021 were up 75% compared to the same time period in 2020. And sales last year were up 60% compared to 2019. U.S. Census Bureau data shows that more than 300 independent bookstores have opened in the U.S. in the last two years.

Mills said her store's overall sales have risen by more than 50% since emerging from its shutdown.

"There's been a lot of gloom and doom about bookstores for a long time, and books just going away, but we've not ever seen that as the case," Mills said.

Driven in part by what some see as a sense of millennial nostalgia for an era preceding Kindles and social media, bookstores' customer bases are trending younger as well. Mills said she started noticing the change in her customers' demographics as the pandemic subsided.

"We had a pretty elderly customer base, and that has very much changed," she said. "There are a lot of those people we haven't seen, and I don't know if it's been health-related or what, but we have a much younger customer base now than we did before the pandemic."

Noting that her inventory covers a range of topics — from baby board books to science fiction, theology, history, gardening and other areas — Mills said customers have added to the variety through trades and donations.

"People have had things on their bucket list maybe for decades and they're finally getting to it," she said. "Pretty much anything you can think of, they've been reading it."

Follow Andy Knight on Twitter @Andrew_J_Knight, or call 765-640-4809.