What Do Booksellers Make Of “The End Of Reading”?

It’s also backed up by the fact that new bookstores keep opening at a rate that defies the end-of-reading narrative. According to the American Booksellers Association’s annual report at the end of 2025, 605 bookstore businesses (basically, any store whose primary goal is to sell books, be they pop-ups, online stores, or traditional storefronts) opened last year, compared to just 65 that closed. The number of new stores is up 87 percent from the same metric in 2024.

I'm fortunate to live right by two independent bookstores and love it. I know new ones have been opening nearby.

Talk to enough booksellers and you’ll find that it’s nearly impossible to square their experience with the despair about the state of reading that these pieces often leave you with. Matt and Megan Bormet opened People’s Book in Takoma Park, Md., in 2023, and shared a bit with me about what they’ve experienced since then. “We opened our store three years ago and had no idea whether anyone would show up when we opened our doors,” Matt said. “We sold about 60,000 books last year (for context, that’s three times the population of our city), and I really don’t know what I’m doing.” He told me later, “We just filled a very obvious need in the community, and people started knocking the doors down.”

I can think of worse things one could spend their money on.

Greg Kornbluh, who opened Downbound Books in Cincinnati in 2019, told me a story that spoke to this particularly well. “Nearly two years ago we started our first book club here, and we gave it a pretty specific remit: Anti-Despair Book Club," he said. "The idea was to pick books—both fiction and non—that would do more than just distract or comfort, but that could actually provide some tools or models for how to face the hardships and alienation of our times.

I'd go to a book club that did this.