Feature
The quiet collapse of the mid-size city bookstore
Big chains and tiny specialists are surviving. The shops in between, with 20,000 titles and a café, are closing one by one.
Editor-in-chief
10 min read
A mid-size bookshop in its final week of trading.
The shop had 22,000 books, a children’s corner, a café that served good coffee and bad cake, and a manager who could find any title in under a minute. It closed in August, after 34 years.
Its story is repeating across Europe’s mid-size cities.
Squeezed from both sides
Large chains win on price and range. Small specialists win on identity and loyalty. Mid-size generalists, too big to be cosy and too small to compete on price, are losing on both fronts.
“We were everybody’s second-favourite bookshop. That is not a business model,” the former owner said.
What survives
The shops that are holding on have narrowed their focus: events, school contracts, subscriptions. Several have become cooperatives, owned by their regular customers.
Clara Lindqvist
Editor-in-chief
Clara has led Pressio since its founding in 2019. Before that she edited the foreign desk of a Nordic daily for a decade.
