by Praveen Madan
June, 2026
Someday a qualified historian will write the story of bookstores that are reshaping their communities and getting reshaped by them. For now, you are stuck with me telling this story the way I’ve been seeing it. I will begin from the moment I started paying attention to it.
It was the summer of 2005 when I heard the news that would end up changing the trajectory of my life. I was in Austin, in my last corporate job. A few months earlier, I had relocated from the Bay Area where I used to live within walking distance of Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park. I had spent many evenings and weekends browsing at Kepler’s. It was my refuge during a challenging stretch of my life. I received the bad news in Austin: Kepler’s had abruptly shut down due to financial challenges. It was clear that Amazon’s rise had started to hurt bookstores and Kepler’s had become a casualty.
Before I had time to fully process this loss, more news started arriving – some guy from Google had started a blog called savekeplers.com, hundreds of customers had gathered outside the closed store, and the city council was holding an emergency meeting. Within days this extraordinary community response had led to Kepler’s reopening its doors with a new lease, new capital from the community, and a board of directors with some of the best minds in Silicon Valley. The New York Times captured it succinctly: Community Investment Rescues a Bookstore.
At the time, it felt like a one-off. It was not!
By 2008, Karl Pohrt, owner of Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor, MI had started planning to convert his bookstore into the nonprofit The Great Lakes Literary Art Center. In 2013, community members of Adobe Books in San Francisco launched a successful membership drive and persuaded the store owner to convert his bookstore to a cooperative. More signals followed. In 2016, Four-Eyed Frog Books in Gualala, CA, became community-owned. Twenty-two people put in money to keep it alive.
Across the country, more and more bookstores are using crowdfunding. Literary entrepreneurs are raising money to launch new bookstores, expand or relocate existing bookstores, and for operational improvement projects for dealing with emergencies.
These are no longer isolated stories. There is a systemic shift underway.
Today you can see more complete versions of these next-generation models that are evolving. Bookmarks in North Carolina and Magic City Books in Oklahoma have built bookstores as community institutions that are entirely financed by their community, are governed by their community, and have robust volunteer programs. These next-generation bookstores are being built to serve their communities and their mission, not their owners. Often they don’t even have owners!
And this pace of change is picking up! Since 2022, Emerson Collective, the innovative philanthropic company founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, has been supporting mission-driven bookstores that adopt hybrid and nonprofit models. Nearly 45 bookstores are part of their program. In her 2025 year-end letter, Jobs referred to bookstores as “Lighthouses for Literacy.” Well-known bookstores like Books & Books in Miami, King’s English in Salt Lake City, and Third Place Books in Seattle are now part of Emerson Collective’s bookstore portfolio.
In a related development, new nonprofit bookstores are showing up across the country. At a recent gathering of bookstores in Northern California, I was pleasantly surprised to run into two nonprofit bookstore founders from Fresno and Daly City. Plenty Bookshop in Cookeville, Tennessee recently made history by becoming the first bookstore to get explicit approval from the Internal Revenue Service to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Many of these new nonprofit bookstores are being started in book deserts in collaboration with local, regional, and national efforts to build sustainable reading culture and improve access to books.
At the recent annual meeting of the American Booksellers Association, they reported having 149 nonprofit bookstore members across the US. The total number of hybrid and nonprofit bookstores in the US must be well over 200.
The idea of community-powered bookstores is no longer experimental. It is a growing grassroots movement that’s being shaped by many forces: literacy warriors on a quest to make a difference in their communities, philanthropists concerned about the state of our country and civic life, and common people hungry for authentic relationships with trusted organizations. Customer acceptance of independent bookstores as a necessary social service had been growing for many years; the pandemic helped accelerate the trend.
The pandemic and the social justice reckoning of 2020 reminded many communities that beloved local institutions are not guaranteed to survive. In a period marked by isolation, uncertainty, and a renewed focus on the institutions that strengthen civic life, bookstores increasingly came to be seen as something more than retail businesses, reinforcing the idea that if these places matter, we must invest in them intentionally.
Kepler’s story of being revived by its community in 2005 had a powerful pull on me. In hindsight, that was the moment I got hooked. Kepler’s had not come back just because it was a desirable retail shop. It came back because the community was treating it as something more. It got me thinking about what it was that the community saw in Kepler’s. What need was Kepler’s serving that was so critical that people rallied to revive a bankrupt business? And what did this incident mean for the future of bookstores? How were they going to compete with the relentless competition from Amazon and stay relevant in the midst of the technology revolution?
At the time I was already searching for new career options. A few months later, I found myself leaving the corporate career track and getting into bookselling. I was convinced that bookstores had to be built differently. Not as fragile businesses, but as community institutions that are built to last. It seemed like a fascinating problem to tackle, and the kind of challenge that would provide me more meaning and purpose than climbing the corporate ladder, working on problems that meant little to me personally.
In an unplanned turn of events, I ended up assuming stewardship of Kepler’s in 2012. I feel blessed to have had a front row seat as not only a witness, but also as a participant and an accidental activist in this growing movement of community-powered bookstores. I have more to share about Kepler’s journey, but that’s another story for another day. For the moment, I’m thrilled to see the community of independent bookstores stirring with renewed life, new ideas, and new allies to meet the moment.