Challenged by technical and market forces, independent bookstores are bouncing back
When traveling across Canada on assignment I usually try to visit museums and art galleries and, if they are available, local bookstores.
While long battered by big box stores and the Indigo-Chapters website, by the ease of shopping on Amazon, and by e-books, I often find that many independent sellers in Canada are not only still around, but apparently thriving.
Being among many Bookmark in Halifax, McNally Robinson Booksellers in Saskatoon and Winnipeg and Audrey’s Books in Edmonton.
This week reporting for an upcoming article on wildfire mitigation brought me to Kelowna, British Columbia, where I added Mosaic books to the list of bookstores I visited. Kelowna, though unusually prosperous and a popular tourist destination, has a population of just 157,000. But at 8,000 square feet and packed with about 17,000 current titles, as well as thousands of surviving books, Mosaic looks like a store you’d expect to find in a city many times the size of Kelowna.
I recently met Michael Neill, owner of Mosaic with his wife Michele, and Alicia Neill, the store manager and Mr. Neill’s daughter, to talk about the state of booksellers in Canada.
Mr. Neill has a broad and particular understanding of the industry. Above the bookshop are the offices of Mr Neill’s other businesses, book manager, through which software systems are used by approximately 530 independent bookstores in Canada and the United States. That business also led directly to his purchase of Mosaic and his family’s move to Kelowna.
Let’s look at some numbers first. Dating back to the distorted pandemic year of 2020, when stores closed, Statistics Canada’s latest analysis found that brick-and-mortar bookstores remained the largest source of book sales in Canada, a $1.5 billion Canadian market at the time.
Mr Neill said there is no single model for success, or at least survival, when it comes to bookshops.
“The interesting thing about independent bookstores is they’re all so different,” he told me in Alicia’s office at the back of the store, which is already filled with Christmas merchandise. “Everyone does their own thing and I like that. That creates some variety.”
Mr. Neill entered the book trade through his mother, Madeline Neill, who founded Black Bond Books in Brandon, Manitoba, and eventually grew it with his sisters into a dozen stores in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. In the 1980s, he began developing software to order books and manage the store’s inventory as an internal project.
Other stores started buying the software and in 1994 Mr. Neill Black Bond to establish Bookmanager as a separate company. Within a year, however, he realized that he still needed a shop to serve as a test bench and laboratory. Founded in 1968, Mosaic hit the market.
It was sold to the Neills by an absent owner. The shop was rudderless, Mr Neill said, unprofitable and generally a dilapidated mess.
The Neills moved it from a side street to Kelowna’s main street to attract tourists. One of the renovations included a café, which eventually proved unprofitable and was replaced by leftover books. (Even in an era of cafe abundance, Kelowna stands out for its extraordinary number of coffee shops.)
But as sales gradually returned, Mosaic was not immune to the blows that hit booksellers in general. The opening of a Costco store caused a drastic drop in bestseller sales. Then sales immediately dropped by about a third after Chapters appeared in a local mall, an issue that accelerated Amazon’s move to Canada.
For Mr. Neill, the late 2000s saw a turning point in the industry with the rise of e-book readers. He said about half of Bookmanager’s customers at the time decided to close their stores rather than take on that digital challenger.
“When I talked to owners, they said ‘Michael, I’m done,’ said Mr. Neill. “E-books are going to be the future. You saw what happened in music. You saw what happened with video. Books are next.”
The Neills disagreed with that prediction – rightly so, it turned out – and continued to invest in Mosaic to recover and grow sales.
Ms. Neill said a sign of the independents’ comeback can be found in her father’s other business. She said there are now 100 stores on a waiting list for Bookmanager systems, and the waiting list itself won’t be taking on new names until November.
This comeback of independents, Mr Neill said, could reflect what book buyers found online were missing when the pandemic forced them there.
“It’s fun trying to build a place where you come in, and you don’t know what you’re looking for or what you’re going to buy,” he said. “You can just experience all things, and then you find things, whereas otherwise you just look for something.”
Trans Canada
Born in Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has been writing about Canada for The New York Times for two decades. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
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