Six hundred and five. That is how many new independent bookstores opened across the US in 2025, according to Allison Hill‘s year-end letter as CEO of the American Booksellers Association. In that same letter, Hill reports that ABA membership grew by 19 percent over the year, and by 151 percent over the past six years.
Those figures sit oddly next to the story most people have absorbed about physical retail, the one where screens quietly finished off the local bookstore a decade ago.
Something else appears to be happening, and the shape of it says something about what readers are actually looking for when they walk through a door instead of opening an app.
The story everyone already believes
For years, the assumption has carried a kind of gravity. E-readers got cheaper, audiobooks got better, and it felt like every strip mall was losing a bookstore to a nail salon or a phone repair shop.
Amazon’s dominance over book retail is well documented and genuinely difficult for small sellers, and Hill’s letter does not pretend otherwise. It names rising costs, tariffs, and what it flatly calls a “monopolistic chokehold” among the real pressures independent stores faced in 2025. Given all of that, a shrinking bookstore count would have been the unremarkable outcome. Instead, the opposite happened.
The count itself
The 605 figure is not pulled from a press release built to look rosy. It comes from the same letter, which spends several paragraphs describing how difficult the year actually was, citing tariffs, book bans, and threats to free expression among the obstacles member stores navigated.
That letter also notes that most existing stores reported higher sales in 2025 than in 2024, and that IndieCommerce, the ABA’s e-commerce platform for member stores, posted a sales increase of more than 21 percent over the prior year. None of that reads like an industry in retreat.
It also is not a one-year blip. The 151 percent membership growth Hill cites covers six years, which means the trend predates any single good season or any one bestseller propping up the numbers. A channel does not grow that consistently by accident. Something about the actual experience of buying a book from an actual store appears to be pulling people back in, or perhaps it never lost them the way the popular narrative assumed.
Not all 605 of those stores are traditional shops with a lease and a storefront sign, either. The ABA’s count includes pop-up stores and mobile ones, the kind that show up at a farmers market one weekend and a festival the next. That detail matters, because it suggests the growth is not only well-funded chains testing a nostalgia play. It looks more like a lot of individual people deciding a folding table and a box of books was worth setting up.
The growth also did not happen in a quiet year for the industry politically. Hill’s letter describes a free-expression team that spent 2025 backing freedom-to-read legislation in several states, fighting censorship bills in others, and supporting individual stores that faced intimidation or threats over what they chose to stock. Running a bookstore in that climate is not a low-friction hobby business. It is closer to an act of stubbornness, repeated 605 times over.
What a bookstore offers that an app doesn’t
“Print books and the substrate of paper lend an obvious physicality to individual texts,” writes reading researcher Anne Mangen and her co-author Adriaan van der Weel, arguing that the format itself changes how a reader relates to what they are holding.
An e-book is a file, functionally identical no matter which copy is opened. A paperback is a specific object, creased in a particular spot, smelling faintly of whatever shelf it sat on, eventually handed off to somebody else in a way a license to read never quite gets passed along.
Digital reading has real conveniences of its own, and plenty of people are well served by it. What research on physical books does point to is a reason why a growing number of readers want the version of reading that does not come with a battery or a notification badge. A screen is built to interrupt itself. A shelf of books just sits there, not competing for anyone’s attention, not asking to be checked.
There is also a less measurable piece of this that the ABA’s letter gestures at directly. Stores are a place where a stranger might recommend the right book at the right moment, or where an aimless browsing session turns up something no algorithm would have surfaced. Hill’s letter frames independent bookstores as one of the few venues still doing that work in person, describing them as providing an antidote for the loneliness epidemic alongside their more obvious job of selling books. Whether or not every store fully lives up to that framing, it points at something an app has never been built to replicate: a room full of strangers who showed up for the same reason.
The curation matters too, in a smaller and more practical way. A handwritten card taped under a book, explaining in one clerk’s actual handwriting why they loved it, works on a reader differently than a row of five-star ratings from accounts with no faces attached. One is a recommendation from a specific person who read the thing and is willing to put their name near their opinion. The other is an average. Readers do not seem to be rejecting convenience so much as they are supplementing it, keeping the algorithm for the book they already know they want and keeping the bookstore for the one they didn’t know existed.
Doors opening anyway
Bookselling has never been an easy way to make a living, and the ABA’s own accounting makes clear that 2025 asked a great deal of the people running these stores. Yet 605 new doors opened regardless, and most of the doors that were already open did better business than the year before. That combination, hardship on one side and expansion on the other, makes more sense once the appeal gets separated from the convenience. A screen will always win on convenience. What it has not managed to win, at least not yet, is the thing that gets someone to walk into a room they did not strictly need to visit, just to see what is on the shelf.
