The American Booksellers Association (ABA) announced recently that forty-three independent bookstores opened in 2012. The stores popped up in twenty-four different states, in smaller towns and cities too, including in Cambridge, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, and St. Paul, MN. Bookstores with the names Booknuts!, BookTonix, Cuppa Pulp, A Fiction Addiction, and Moon Palace Books all made welcome additions to the precarious and endangered world of contemporary bricks-and-mortar bookselling.

Of the forty-three new stores, six are branches of existing stores, and seven are mainly used-book sellers. Seven opened up in California, five in New York, three in both Florida and Texas, and two in Kansas, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.

Linda Nurick, who opened Cellar Door Books in Riverside, CA, told the ABA, “I knew my city needed an independent bookstore, and I saw that this was happening nationwide. People were starting to regret, perhaps, the demise of the indie bookstore.”

So maybe we’re not quite in the midst of the end of bookstores in America. Not yet, anyway.

Source: http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/41-new-bookstores-opened-in-2012_b64010