Deborah Langston remembers sitting on the floor of her bookstore, Beachtown Books, next to her husband, daughters, sister, nieces and one employee reorganizing books in the dead of night while the doors remained closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Almost every book came off the shelves and we evaluated every book. We cleaned every book, we stickered every book and, you know, we had many nights that we were there until three in the morning with just books on the floor finding a system. And so the rebuild was family,” Langston said.
From struggling to pay rent or obtain inventory, to competing with large online merchandisers or other forms of entertainment, a handful of independent used bookstores have overcome several obstacles in order to operate in Orange County. However, these stores were about to face a new challenge in the battle to stay open: the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Langston and her husband Scott, who own Beach Town Books in San Clemente together, they used the shutdown as a time to reorganize their bookstore and establish more efficient processes. Deborah Langston said they color-coded the different sections and cleaned their books with essential oils.
“If the store wasn’t shut down, maybe we wouldn’t have put those systems in place because we wouldn’t have had a slow enough moment to properly evaluate and be really critical of how we do business,” Langston said.
Many independent used bookstores struggled to survive during the pandemic and shut down because they could not afford to keep their business open and they were conscious of their community’s health. While some recovered from the shutdown, others went out of business.
Today, there are only 15 independent used bookstores in Orange County.
David Hess, the co-owner of The Bookman in Orange with his business partner Paul Bonaventure, said when the bookstore opened in 1990, there were over 30 other used bookstores in Orange County.
“A bookstore is important to any community, it’s sad to see them go. I mean it’s a sign of knowledge, a place of knowledge and culture and ideas, you know. That’s what a bookstore represents,” Hess said.
Langston said she bought the bookstore in 2017 from the previous owner because she could not imagine living in a town without a local bookstore. She said the success of her bookstore would not be possible without the help of her husband, who is currently recovering from cancer.
“I really had concern that we were going to lose our bookstore in town and I wanted a bookstore in town and so I asked my husband if we could do it and really he’s the reason the bookstore got turned around,” Langston said. “He was my paintbrush and the bookstore was my canvas and I think he did a lovely job.”
Similar to Langston, Sam Robertson and her husband, Mike, opened their bookstore Arvida Book Company and Tolima Coffee Company in Tustin during the pandemic. Although Robertson faced some resistance initially, she said her family and community supported her dreams of opening a bookstore with a coffee shop inside.
Robertson said she recalls standing outside of a vacant hardware store in Tustin with her mother, a landlord who believed in her business plan and her two daughters in her arms. After investing in reinventing the space and donating her own books, Robertson turned it into a home for Arvida Book Company.
“I think there’s a lot to be said about opening during the pandemic because we didn’t have to adapt really. It was we who were inventing the wheel at the time,” Robertson said.
After recently celebrating their third year in business, Robertson said she was overjoyed by the book donations and support she received from the community that helped start her company.
“Bookstores aren’t just a retail space, it’s so much more than that. The things on our shelves are not just objects in the traditional sense, they’re stories,” Robertson said.
The Shift to Selling Books Online
While some bookstores did not survive the shutdown, others were able to reopen their doors and reimagine their business. During the lockdown, some stores began selling books online.
Langston said in addition to starting a text line for book requests and private shopping appointments, she tried to improve the social media marketing tactics in order to spread awareness outside of Orange County.
Sarah Rafael Garcia, the owner of a bookstore and non-profit in Santa Ana called LibroMobile, said she also tried to improve their social media pages. However, she said it was hard for them to maintain their social media presence because it involved employees going into the store and taking pictures of the books individually and it was difficult to keep track of online book orders.
Hess said that was indicative of “pre-internet” book shopping, in contrast to “post-internet” book shopping.
“A lot of the stuff that made a bookstore interesting – first-editions, signed books, new loads coming in – you know, things that people would drive to a bookstore for, especially their favorite bookstore,” Hess said. “A little bit of that is gone with the internet. Everything became so accessible, it became so at your fingertips that it’s just not the same thing.”
Hess said some people during the pandemic also started selling books from home and they did not struggle in the same way that bookstores did.
“There are a lot of people out there who get books and they don’t have any overhead or they don’t have to pay rent so they can work out of their garage and sell books pretty cheap,” Hess said.
The staff at Half Off Books, Records, & Films in Fullerton also tried to refresh their website to sell online during the pandemic. However, the manager of Half of Books, Records, & Films, Jason Brown, said the website did not have a strong enough infrastructure to support this new business model.
“There wasn’t an easy pivot at that moment and a lot of places were demanded to shut down. I know that nobody was really in charge exactly, that’s what it felt like,” Brown said. “We were all really grinding our teeth, questioning how this was going to go.”
How Mandatory Shutdowns Affected Bookstore Tenants
While some bookstores turned to online sales, others took time away from selling books at their stores.
Adele Canetti owns Bargain Book World in the Mainplace Mall in Santa Ana, the Shops at Mission Viejo, and Lake Elsinore. Canetti said she is a full-time financial advisor and when malls were closed, so were two of her locations.
“I got a break,” Canetti said, “We got through it. I mean I know there are very traumatic stories, but if you don’t have to pay rent, you don’t have to pay payroll, you know we were able to make it through it.”
Friends of the Library Bookstores and Library Closures
Similar to mall shutdowns, bookstores located in libraries also closed to the public when the local libraries shut their doors. For the Friends of the Library Bookstores, they closed when libraries shut down in March 2020.
There are also 22 Friends of the Library Bookstores in conjunction with the Orange County Public Library system. However, four locations are currently closed. There is also the Guild Bookstore run by the Brea Park Library District.
Wade Lillywhile, the manager of the Friends of the Library Bookstore at the Heritage Park Library in Irvine, said the store was closed for as long as the library was.
According to their records, the Friends of the Library Bookstore at Heritage Park brought in about $45,423 of revenue from July 2019 until March 2020. After reopening, they made $39,009 in revenue from July 2021 to the end of June 2022.
When the libraries reopened to the public, the Friends of the Library Bookstores still had to pass county inspections before selling books again. Lillywhite said this was a tedious process and some Friends of Library Bookstores had to go through the inspection more than once.
“Once we did get the green light to begin operations again, we had to go through a number of safety inspections and cleaned the store from top to bottom,” Lillywhite said. “We basically got rid of almost all the inventory that was left, which wasn’t much and started over per the county instructions,” Lillywhite said.
Although the Friends of the Library Bookstores do not have to pay rent to the libraries and their staff are volunteers, Lillywhite said all of the book purchases go towards programming and book collections at the library.
Surviving on the Shoulders of Local Communities
For Langston and many of these used bookstore owners, the heartbeat of used bookstores lies in the partnership she has with her community.
“Readers are looking for an environment, a comfortable environment, to look for something they’re interested in and they really aren’t that many bookstores around anymore,” Langston said.
Rafael Garcia said the inspiration behind the bookstore was affordability to help build an economy where the community is part of the profit.
“People are still definitely reading books, it’s just who prioritizes what and I think for used books we’re talking about our community because a lot of our zip code are still underserved. Buying a book is a privilege,” Rafael Garcia said.
For Canetti, education and reading are important to her. She said wants to keep books accessible and affordable to encourage her customers to read more without working harder to find the right books.
“I like to get books into people’s hands. I love it, it makes me feel great and I like it because we make it incredibly accessible to people,” Canetti said. “I want it to be accessible to anyone.”
The Next Chapter for Independent Bookstores
In terms of the future of used bookstores, Hess said it is still uncertain what will happen to the industry. He said he thinks the bookstores that are open will continue to survive but he does not know about future bookstores.
“It’s really hard to say if people are going to attempt to still open them,” Hess said. “Things change so you have to adapt. There are still enough people coming in looking at books, there’s still an audience for it.”
In contrast, Lillywhite said the used bookstore industry is very fragile. He said the Friends of the Library Bookstores should be able to survive because they have low expenses. However, independent bookstores each have a unique business model.
“The independent bookstores, most of them are barely able to pay their rent and survive so the day will come where most of them may disappear because of the cost factor. So I think it’s important for people to continue to support them while they’re still around and hopefully prolong their existence as much as possible,” Lillywhite said.
