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Originally Posted by shalym
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That chart is more than slightly deceptive: the truncated vertical axis exagerates the drop in the convered years and the truncated horizontal axis hides the much bigger drop that came before. And to top it off what they are charting isn't bookstores proper but places that sell books. Much bigger number, what with newstands, drugstore chains, supermarkets, etc.
Try this one:
http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/12-stats-...america-today/
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The number of independent bookstores dropped from 2,400 to 1,900 between 2002 and 2011.
A big chunk of the booksellers who have closed their doors have been independent retailers who’ve found it hard to compete with online shops and e-books. The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for book retailers, has seen membership drop by 600 stores since 2002. Two decades ago, there were more than 4,000 independent bookstores in the U.S.
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The report is from 2012, so the number of independents went from 4000 around 1992 to 2400 (40% drop) in 2002 due to the rise of the big box stores. After 2002, the biggest drops were in the chain stores and then Borders collapsed (with a big assist from the BPHs).
Very little of those earlier drops had much to do with online sales or ebooks.
There is no shortage of places to buy books (as a category) but the number of places to buy midlist/backlist titles has always been small, with entire swaths of the nation bookstore-less and stuck with whatever rack of bestsellers the jobbers delivered to the newsstands and supermarkets. There is a reason the book clubs were so successful back in the day.