![]() ![]() Green’s message resonates particularly strongly with the new generation of booksellers, who put a great deal of stock in what’s authentic, local, and physical-even as they grasp more easily than their elders how social media can help build a real-life community. “We’re in the story business.” Successful independent booksellers understand that difference, and are learning to embrace it, with all the passion and “unironic enthusiasm” they can summon. “We’re not in the widgets business,” as Green puts it. But even Amazon hasn’t quite learned that books aren’t just another commodity. If you strive to be comprehensive, the “Everything Store” will beat you every time-Borders learned that the hard way. A rousing keynote by John Green, author of the YA smash hit The Fault in our Stars and a hero to this crowd for his insistence on doing events solely at indies, summed up the philosophy that’s driving the resurgence: You can’t be all things to all customers. “We’ve got all this new blood, this new energy, this new enthusiasm,” says Oren Teicher, CEO of the ABA, who has watched the event evolve from one at which he could name all the attendees to this sea of unfamiliar faces. But in recent years, the mood has shifted, and this year’s event, at the century-old Grove Park Inn, felt positively festive. “We bought the bookshop and now I’m never leaving and I really love my life.” If her industry is doomed, Daniels apparently doesn’t know it, or doesn’t care.ĭaniels was one of 500 independent booksellers who gathered recently in Asheville, North Carolina, for the American Booksellers Association’s 10th annual “Winter Institute”-an event that’s part conference, part boot camp, and part support group for these holdouts against Amazon. Did she want to take a look? “I’m not athletic, but I got up at 5 in the morning that morning and I went for a run because I had this feeling that my life was going to change on that day, like really change,” she says. Then she got a call from her cousin, who owns the local newspaper in the quaint small town of Southern Pines. “Fifty months ago, in November, I was living in New York, working in production for a daytime television show, and I never thought I would leave,” she says. Young enough to measure her life experiences in shorter blocks than years, she’s part of a new generation of passionate, tech-savvy booksellers. She recently became the co-owner and manager of a 61-year-old independent bookstore in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and she’s considerably younger than most of her staff and customers-an unpredictable mix of wealthy retirees, equestrians, and officers from nearby Fort Bragg. Kimberly Daniels doesn’t like to give her age. ![]()
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