Children participate in a weekly story time at Plenty Bookshop in Cookeville, Tennessee, where literacy programs and community events are central to the bookstore’s nonprofit mission. (Photo by Emily Armstrong)
Across the United States, a new generation of civic leaders is reimagining how bookstores can serve their communities. In rural Mississippi, a former policy advisor returned home to open Friendly City Books, which now runs an annual book festival drawing thousands of readers. In New Orleans’s long-underserved Seventh Ward, a neighborhood native and former finance executive founded Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore pairing author events with children’s financial literacy workshops. Along the Rio Grande in Brownsville, Texas, a young engineer built Búho (“owl” in Spanish). Created in the spirit of the Junto, Benjamin Franklin’s club for mutual improvement, Bùho hosts lectures and bilingual family events that help connect people across a border city.
Community-driven bookstores like these nurture readers, foster in-person connection, and offer something increasingly rare: a physical space for gathering across generations, perspectives, and walks of life. But despite their value, most need to compete as for-profit businesses in a market increasingly stacked against them. On the one hand, they face the size and scale of e-commerce giants, which can fulfill books cheaper and faster than any local business. On the other, they must contend with the rising cost of living and retail overhead. Despite a well-documented recovery in the past decade, the overall number of US bookstores has fallen by nearly 60 percent since the early 1990s, while recent American Booksellers Association financial surveys show indie bookstores operating on net margins of around 1 percent. Independent booksellers often accept high risk and financial strain to provide a public good, particularly in the less-affluent markets and rural places that need them most.
Recognizing this dilemma, many European countries—including Germany, France, and Italy—have passed laws that protect indie bookstores from the threat of e-commerce and create incentives for communities to invest in their stores. In Asia, the Chinese government subsidizes bookstores directly, including in rural places, while the Japanese government recently launched a task force to revive its bookstores.
In the United States, arts and culture work has long relied more on philanthropy and civil society than government support. The organizations that support bookstores usually do so within the constraints of the for-profit model. The American Booksellers Association and regional trade associations, for example, provide industry education, advocacy, and networking. Author James Patterson and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation provide direct cash support to bookstore owners and employees, often as one-time grants, including during emergencies like fires and floods. And platforms like Bookshop.org have expanded access to e-commerce and digital sales for independent bookstores. But largely missing is a pathway for bookstores to reimagine their structure in alignment with their public mission.
Emerson Collective is a company that supports literacy, education, economic mobility, and the environment through a blend of investment and philanthropy. During the pandemic, as lockdowns and store closures threatened civic life, it began researching the value independent bookstores bring to their communities, the challenges they face, and ways that philanthropy could help them flourish. As the company surveyed the bookstore landscape, it found promising experimentation already underway. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Magic City Books had adopted a nonprofit structure pairing retail bookselling with literary programming, including more than 100 annual author events and an adult book fair drawing thousands of local readers. And as SSIR documented in 2016, Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park sought to become a “bookstore of the 21st century” by restructuring as a hybrid entity, retaining its retail operations within a for-profit arm while migrating programs and school partnerships to an affiliated nonprofit. The question for Emerson Collective’s philanthropy team, who led this work, was not how to reproduce any one store’s model, but how to distill what was working so that other bookstore leaders could build on it, especially in smaller markets and rural communities.
Hybrid and Nonprofit Models
In 2022, the philanthropy team began inviting community-driven bookstores to consider moving to a hybrid or nonprofit model with Emerson Collective’s support. In a hybrid model, a bookstore operates alongside a sister nonprofit through a shared services agreement. This approach is often most viable for existing store owners, allowing them to retain their invested capital while offering a straightforward legal pathway relative to full nonprofit conversion. While the business retains retail sales, the nonprofit arm takes over programming and community work. This creates operational efficiency and makes it economically viable to do something most bookstores cannot: provide books to children and families who may not be able to afford them. To maximize the nonprofit arm’s efficiencies and minimize costs, the sister nonprofit may choose to purchase books from the bookstore at market or below-market rates, creating a viable, locally rooted mechanism for expanding book access.
The nonprofit model, by contrast, is often a better fit for new bookstores with an explicitly charitable and community-centered mission. In this structure, bookselling and programming operate within a single entity to advance that mission. While this creates a simpler model, leaders must clearly demonstrate that the organization is organized and operated for a charitable purpose (such as advancing education, supporting literature, or combating community deterioration) to qualify for tax-exempt status.
Today, Emerson Collective supports nearly 50 bookstores nationwide, spanning cultural centers like Detroit and Miami; former industrial hubs like Steubenville, Ohio; and rural places such as Wardensville, West Virginia, and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. These partnerships include three to four years of seed funding and a playbook to educate leaders on the model. The company also brings partners together for an annual convening and supports them in traveling to visit each other’s bookstores, which has created a practice of sharing knowledge and collaboration.
The adoption of these models, alongside fundraising coaching, is reshaping the underlying economics of bookstores in ways that support long-term resilience and sustainability. With Emerson Collective’s initial support, partners are raising funds independently to support their nonprofits or nonprofit arms. Fundraising strategies vary by community. Some leaders cultivate relationships with regional foundations and major donors, while others build support through local businesses, membership programs, events, and grassroots campaigns. In a field where margins are razor-thin, even modest support fills a critical gap. This is especially true for smaller bookstores operating hybrid models. Because the hybrid model does not need to add significant overhead and partners already run robust community and educational programs, this revenue often functions as flexible operating support, covering the cost of ongoing charitable work that would otherwise strain the retail side. Fundraising revenue equal to just 5–7 percent of sales can stabilize a bookstore’s operations, providing breathing room to invest in staff and maintain strong charitable programs, and many in Emerson Collective’s early cohorts have already exceeded this goal.
Three Areas of Social Impact
The social impact of sustainable independent bookstores is most visible across three areas: economic vitality, literacy, and social fabric.
In terms of economic vitality, a recent study by Civic Economics and the American Booksellers Association found that independent bookstores recirculate approximately 29 percent of their revenue locally through wages and purchasing—more than double the rate of chain retailers. They also generate additional economic activity by drawing visitors to commercial districts. Customers who come for books or events often stay to visit nearby shops, restaurants, and cafes, contributing to the broader vitality of Main Streets.
Emerson Collective’s bookstore partners are seeing their impact as economic anchors in real time. For example, Lisa Uhrik at Plenty Bookshop, a fully nonprofit bookstore in Cookeville, Tennessee, collected data from customers and 11 neighboring businesses in the 10 months following Plenty’s launch. She found consistent increases in sales across nearby businesses, with reported gains ranging from the mid-teens to nearly 40 percent, while 92 percent of Plenty’s customers reported visiting another local business during their trip downtown.
Regarding literacy, decades of research show that access to books at home is a strong predictor of academic success, even controlling for income and parental education, with the largest effects among children who start with the fewest books. By design, hybrid and nonprofit bookstores are engines of book ownership—not only for regular customers, but also for families with limited access.
Emerson Collective’s partners donate thousands of age-appropriate books to children in underserved communities while also engaging families in the practice of reading together. In Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood, for example, Whose Books pairs bilingual storytimes with book giveaways. This works to destigmatize reading aloud for caregivers developing English fluency and to embed it as a daily practice in the Spanish-speaking households they serve. Surveys and parent testimonials from the company’s portfolio meanwhile suggest increased enthusiasm for reading and more consistent reading practices within the home.
Finally, bookstores play an important role in building the social fabric of their communities. Emerson Collective’s work draws on Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “third place” outside of home and work that fosters local connection, as well as research by Raj Chetty showing that upward mobility is strongly associated with “economic connectedness,” or the friendships and social ties that form across socioeconomic lines, especially between low- and high-income children. The company’s hybrid and nonprofit bookstore partners are uniquely positioned to function as the community setting where these cross-class connections can form. By design, they serve both regular customers, who purchase new books and attend events, and families with more limited access, who bookstores often draw in through free programming, school partnerships, and book giveaways.
Act 4 Books, a bookstore founded by a fourth-generation dairy farmer in rural Western New York, first introduced many children and families to the bookstore through partnerships with local Title I schools. Now these families are returning for author events, workshops, game nights, and other community gatherings alongside longtime local readers and residents. Models and programs like these are making the bookstore a common place where new relationships form across walks of life, laying the groundwork for community cohesion and opportunity.
Looking to the future, there is an opportunity to coordinate public and private partners to make reading more visible and vibrant across civic life. Emerson Collective is also expanding support for libraries that are finding new ways to collaborate with bookstores on public programs, literacy efforts, and reading initiatives. Policy makers are starting to engage as well: The recently introduced Open Books, Open Doors Act would support bookstores and other local institutions working to combat book deserts and expand access to books for young readers. With the right investment, the United States can set a new standard for how to build thriving and connected communities around books and reading, with great bookstores at the center.
Read more stories by William Ames.