By 2011, mutterings about the death of the book had broken into a roar, with US bookseller Barnes & Noble reporting that it now sold three times as many digital books as all formats of physical books combined, while Amazon claimed it had crossed the tipping point, with 242 ebooks sold for every 100 hardbacks. In the dark days of 2009, bookshops were reported to be closing at a rate of two a week, resulting in a 27% reduction in a decade. This is still a fair way off the numbers operating at the start of the millennium, but that was before ebooks and online retailing took hold. I never thought in a month of Sundays that Kindles would replace the experience of curling up with a book According to the Booksellers Association, after six years of consecutive growth, there are now 1,072 independent stores – up from 867 in 2016. Meanwhile, the number of independent booksellers in the UK and Ireland soared to a 10-year high last year. In January, Waterstones posted a £42.1m profit after tax for the financial year ending April 2022 – up from £2.9m in 2020/21 and £19.7m in 2019/20. It is a qualitative survey inspired by surprising news that, at a time when a lot of shops are struggling amid a cost of living crisis that has followed hot on the heels of a pandemic, bookselling is thriving. This is my first stop on a bookshop crawl that will take in five very different stores within a 13-mile radius of the centre of Birmingham. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian Sarah Mullen gave up her job as a solicitor and now runs Bookshop on the Green, which has an in-house writer who pens bespoke poems for children. He made his cosplay debut last month as the Gruffalo, in a sold-out storytelling session on the village green, as part of a week celebrating Birmingham’s independent bookshops. In the multitasking tradition of small retailers, Taylor also works in the shop. He has composed a lot of Batman and football poems for the children who pile in on Saturdays, he says, before sitting down to tap one out for me about the joy of bookshops. Beside it stands Bradley Taylor, a poet whose job is to write poems on demand for anyone who asks. When I visit early on a Friday morning, a turquoise vintage Smith Corona typewriter holds centre stage in the Bookshop on the Green. Two years on, the Bookshop on the Green is thriving – a living rebuttal to the once widely held idea that the digital era meant certain death for the neighbourhood bookstore. But far from accepting defeat, she rolled up her sleeves once again and “pivoted the whole thing into a bookshop”. Mullen’s task was to set up the Bournville BookFest, which ran for 10 years before being brought to a halt by the Covid pandemic. Pregnant with her third child, she had recently given up her job as a solicitor to work for the Bournville Village Trust. “So we all rolled up our sleeves and did it ourselves,” she says.
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