bookstoredayI didn’t find out until it was mostly over, but Slashdot notes today is Independent Bookstore Day, in which independent bookstores across the country celebrate being independent bookstores. Various exclusive bookstore-only offerings are on sale, including a Neil Gaiman coloring book.

The Independent Bookstore Day site proudly declares:

In a world of tweets and algorithms and pageless digital downloads, bookstores are not a dying anachronism.  They are living, breathing organisms that continue to grow and expand. In fact, there are more of them this year than there were last year. And they are at your service.

I certainly won’t argue with that. Statistics have shown many people like to buy both e-books and print books, and buying the print books locally helps you keep the money in your neighborhood a little longer. Print books aren’t going to disappear any time soon. And some independent bookstores even sell e-books, too.

If you’d like to find participating bookstores, you can check out your hometown using the store finder. There aren’t a whole lot of participating stores—even somewhere huge like Indianapolis only has one, and it’s one I’ve never even hard of on the east side of town. But if you like the idea of keeping bookstores around, be sure to find one and show your love—and maybe even grab a Neil Gaiman coloring book.

And if it’s too late for you to take part today, remember to mark your calendar for next year. Independent bookstores will almost certainly still be around.

1 COMMENT

  1. I love and support Indie Bookstore Day, and I hope my local bookstore gets a ton of new traffic.

    That said, the few items I was interested in were long gone when I arrived two minutes after the store opened. Seriously, I was there at 9:32 this morning and the manager, still tying balloons outside, said people had been lined up and the 5 copies of the Gaiman coloring book were gone in the first 30 seconds.

    Next closest participating bookstore was 2 hours away. Gaiman’s book is already up on eBay for 4 or 5x the cover price. As a friend put it, it’s like all the disappointment of Record Store Day but for readers.

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