It doesn’t have to be a holiday like Independent Bookstore Day for people to want to shop at their local indie bookstore. In fact, new data from the American Booksellers Association shows a dramatic growth in independent bookstores across the United States.
Between 2020 and 2025, the number of independent bookstores in the U.S. jumped by 70%. And in 2025 alone, 422 new independently owned shops opened nationwide, up 31% from 2024.
It’s a surprising twist, considering years of Amazon dominance and big bookstore chains consolidating smaller retailers. For years, the data pointed to the demise of locally owned brick-and-mortar bookstores, and by 2009, the number of those shops dropped to an all-time low, according to Fast Company.
But following the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, indie bookstore growth began trending upward, with many retailers focusing on the in-person communal spaces these stores often provide.
“If you step back and try to understand what really happened from 2010 to today, it is a story of resilience,” Ryan Raffaelli, a professor at Harvard Business School, told Fast Company.
Raffaelli has spent years researching the turnaround of indie bookstores.
“It’s a story of hope. And it’s a story about the power of community.”
Anderson’s Bookshops, an Illinois-based indie bookstore group, recently posted a TikTok video discussing the impact of Amazon on smaller retailers, specifically noting that Amazon often sells books at a loss, in the hopes that shoppers will add more items to their cart online.
But while retail giants can offer slightly lower prices, brick-and-mortar bookstores offer human connection: Events, book signings, book clubs, and more.
“Big business box sellers can’t offer you curated selections chosen by booksellers who actually read them first,” a spokesperson for Anderson’s said on TikTok.
“And there are no opportunities on Amazon to meet your favorite author. But we give you 250 of those opportunities a year here at Anderson’s.”
Some stores have events nearly every day, sometimes with multiple signings, story times, and gatherings in a single weekend.
“These are not just author events, but birthday parties, all these other types of things that are inviting people into the actual physical space to engage with other like-minded individuals that are passionate about literary topics,” Raffaeli told Fast Company.
“People start finding their own tribe and they go, ‘I want to be around these people.’”
But even without the physical space bookstores provide, independent book sales are also on the rise.
In 2025, Bookshop.org, an online retailer that supports an indie bookstore of your choice every time you shop, saw sales grow by 55%. Launched in 2020 to help indie shops survive the pandemic, the platform has raised over $40 million for booksellers since, according to Book Riot.
While Bookshop.org has catered to the modern need for convenience, and Amazon still attempts to monopolize the industry, experts like Raffaeli still find the community aspect of these spaces to be the selling feature for most shoppers, who don’t mind paying a suggested retail price on a new title if it means they get to share it with other bibliophiles.
“It begins to shift the value proposition for why you would pay more in the independent bookstore compared to as if you were shopping online at a discount,” Raffaeli said. “Because many consumers will say, ‘I will pay extra because I know that this is actually an investment in my community.’”
There is perhaps no one more aware of this exchange than novelist Ann Patchett, who in 2011, opened her own bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee: Parnassus Books.
“I’ve come to believe that if you’re interested in living in a society where people read, it’s also your responsibility to cultivate readers,” Patchett said in a 2026 TED Talk in Vancouver, which will be released online later this year.
“Whether it’s presidential histories or mysteries, what we see is that books give people the means by which to connect. The conversations may start with books, but they go everywhere,” Patchett concluded. “Reading shines the light that disrupts the dark isolation so many people find themselves in. Go to your local bookstore and see what I’m talking about.”
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