A movement. An imperative.

Reimagining Bookstores is our way of dreaming and working toward independent bookstores that deepen literacy, strengthen their communities, and pay living wages. We officially launched in 2021 with a virtual gathering co-sponsored by 24 bookstores, but the story goes further back.

This is a project that grew organically out of individual efforts to build a next-generation bookstore in 2007, and has since been developed by numerous vested groups of people: booksellers and bookstore owners, as well as publishers, journalists, whole-system transformation practitioners, leadership experts and many members of the community. In 2012 these efforts were developed into a new vision, the hybrid/nonprofit model, and a bold experiment, Kepler’s 2020: Building the Community Bookstore of the Future.

Today, in 2026, the community-powered bookstore is no longer an experiment. The result of many individual and neighborhood efforts across the country, from big cities to book deserts, we are seeing new and innovative models with bold ideas, vibrant communities and sound financials.

We’re connecting the dots for the better health of our own stores, but our stores are tied to our communities, and our communities are tied to each other. 

More than retail spaces, indies are essential cultural and civic institutions that strengthen the fabric of our communities. They create places where people gather to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and engage with the world around them. The need for this has never been more urgent.

And it has been manifesting in many creative ways! On our end, we organized the world’s first Future Search for Reinventing the Community Bookstore in 2012. We’re proud that Beyond Bookstores was first conceived as a result of our virtual gathering in 2021; we are supporting the development of a documentary; we brought together Professional Booksellers School and Whole School Leadership to develop a leadership training program for bookstore owners and managers and produced an interactive session with Monica Guzman for her book I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. We are helping unlock new philanthropic and impact capital for the bookstore sector. 

It’s a growing movement, and we are continuing to learn from and boost it. We’ll be updating this page in the coming months. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from you – don’t hesitate to reach out for any reason. You can also sign up for our free Substack (coming soon) or join our groups.io listserv.

Want to read more? Here’s the paper that seeded the inaugural gathering in 2021, with a new preface for 2026. We plan to keep writing this story. We hope you’ll join us.