Thanks to all who attended our inaugural gathering on Oct 18-19, 2021

To continue the work we began together, we have a few calls to action:

Survey. Please take a few moments to share some thoughts about your experience. Your feedback is invaluable; your answers will help determine our next steps.

Bulletin board. To support you in continuing your conversations, and in bringing new people into them, we have created a public Bulletin Board where anyone can post an invitation for a conversation. You can specify dates and times or just name a topic and work with those who RSVP to determine when to meet. If you need a Zoom line, we can also provide one for you. View the Bulletin board here, and use this form to add your invitations to it.

Notes. In the spirit of radical transparency, we have posted all of the session notes from both days, along with our plenary notes and final session notes, here on the Reimagining Bookstores website. If you have any questions or concerns, please email support@reimaginingbookstores.org.

Email group. We have also set up an email discussion group to support ongoing connections between us. The group is open to anyone interested in the future of bookstores. If that’s you, check it out here. You can read more about our purpose here, and our original call to gather is below.

Finally, we’ve captured the cloud we made together out of our one-word takeaways.

Thanks again. Let’s keep this going!

– The Conference Organizers

Original Call to Gather

Imagine bookstores with new ways to engage their communities, easy access to funding and new business models. Now imagine these bookstores having strategies to increase readership, attract and retain high-caliber staff, and provide meaningful careers paying meaningful wages. Through these bookstores our communities deepen literacy, increase civic engagement, and become stronger.

If you can imagine this scenario, then it is time to embrace bookstores as a social cause. It is time to invest in bookstores so they have the means to strengthen and reinvent themselves. We seek to launch a movement to encourage a new wave of investments in bookstores similar to the investments that have historically been made in public libraries, museums, public radio and television, and non-profit journalism and literacy organizations.

To create this transformational change, we need you!

We invite you to dream and collaborate together – to reimagine and transform America’s bookstores into next-generation community bookstores, to help literary entrepreneurs open new bookstores in book deserts, and to help bookstores strengthen their place in the hearts of their communities as thriving centers for ideas and conversations.