'Amazon can never be us.' How Seattle's independent bookstores have met the digital age

Estelita's Library in Seattle's Central District started simply enough in 2018.

"Just books on a shelf," co-founder Edwin Lindo said. "I got the wood with two friends from Lowe's. We put the shelves up at 2 a.m. We were there all night. Estella — who Estelita's is named after — who's now our 8-year-old daughter, was about 6 months old. We put a pillow and a pad on the ground, and she laid down and fell asleep on the floor while we were hammering in the shelves. And we filled the shelves with my collection of books."

Seattle Independent Bookstore Day is on April 25, kicking off 10 days dedicated to filling your shelves with books from local booksellers, like Estelita's Library and the 33 participating stores in the Seattle area alone.

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Lindo, a critical race theory scholar, professor, and assistant dean at the University of Washington School of Medicine, filled those shelves with books with an eye toward social justice and community. Like the name of the shop suggests, it operates a lot like a library.

"You're in community with us," Lindo said. "We have a little sign-up form for a book, and then you bring it back. And no one has ever stolen a book from Estelita's, which is a beautiful thing."

Community is key to Lindo and his co-founder and wife, Dr. Estell Williams. Books were just the beginning when the space originally opened in Beacon Hill. Estelita's Library, then and now, is an organizing space, a "community living room."

It's quite the opposite of another local entity that started with books. Just don't call Estelita's the anti-Amazon.

"I don't like to be the anti of anything," Lindo said. "Our imagination is so unique and innovative that it could never actually have been created by something that wasn't grounded in community."

Amazon may have the digital marketplace, but it doesn't have people who bring in a space heater to keep customers warm like Estelita's does.

"Amazon can never be us," Lindo said.

And Estelita's Library does actually have a strong digital backing, too. It's the top Seattle bookstore on Bookshop.org, an online marketplace that allows customers to pick an independent bookstore to receive the profits from their purchases.

Andy Hunter founded the website in January 2020, already aware of independent bookstores' need to keep up with digital sales; that need became even more significant when the COVID-19 pandemic put the world on lockdown just two months later.

"When I was a kid, my fantasy future was to run a small bookstore and live in the back with my cat," Hunter said.

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He hasn't accomplished that dream just yet, but he has worked with books as an independent publisher and digital guru of sorts.

"When I was younger, I got a job in Disney's IT department as a $12-an-hour temporary administrative assistant, and I was dead broke. I only cared about art and writing. But I sat next to somebody who was solving the Y2K bug for them, and he was making $120 an hour," Hunter said. "You know the cliche where people yell at arty people on the internet and say 'learn to code'? Well, I learned to code."

In addition to Bookshop, org, Hunter co-founded the website Literary Hub. He became the guy in the literary community who knew something about coding and e-commerce, things many of his colleagues had no interest in but would desperately need after Amazon appeared on the scene.

In 1995, the year Amazon opened to the public, Hunter said the American Booksellers Association had more than 5,500 members. By 2019, that number was down to 1,887.

"Bookstores are extremely important to a vital, vibrant culture of reading," Hunter said. "I understood that if we allowed this trend to continue, where Amazon was now selling half of the books being purchased in this country, online or in person, and they were growing at a rate of 6 to 8% a year... how would independent bookstores survive?"

Plenty of people in the publishing and bookselling world already felt like saving independent bookstores was a lost cause, even after Hunter drew up the plan for the nonprofit Bookshop.org to give them a leg up online.

"'Amazon's going to beat you on price. Amazon's going to beat you on speed,'" Hunter recalled people telling him. "But I knew that people who loved books like me often had formative experiences in local bookstores. ... We just needed to build something that would allow them to support local bookstores when they bought online."

Since launching in 2020, Bookshop.org has given over $46 million to the local bookshops customers chose on the website. According to the organization, the website has also helped grow online sales for local stores by 600% in five years.

And while Hunter said there are plans in the works to continue to increase digital sales, the point is to keep more independent bookstores thriving online and in person.

"Booksellers are weird. They're iconoclastic," Hunter said. "We want like 5,000 weirdos telling you about books, not one giant corporation that's trying to make as much money as possible."

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While he did not explicitly identify as a "weirdo," Tom Nissley has been one of Seattle's independent booksellers since 2014 when he opened Phinney Books in Phinney Ridge.

Phinney Books is one of the 33 Seattle-area shops participating in Independent Bookstore Day, and you can find them on Bookshop.org. Hunter said some independent booksellers were skeptical of his online marketplace idea, but not Nissley. Nissley said he loved it from the start.

That's because Nissley knew firsthand how important e-commerce was. After all, he'd worked on Amazon's books team for 10 years.

"I liked my job at Amazon. I got to talk to incredible authors. It's how I got to know the book business," Nissley said. "Back when we had a little power to recommend books, I could get behind a book and we could sell a thousand copies. But I would rather sell one copy to a person I know or a person I see in person in my neighborhood."

Bookshop.org has become a supplement to that, allowing people to support his shop from afar, while he focuses on the brick-and-mortar operation.

"What I love is I walk in there and I don't know what my day's going to be like, who's going walk in," Nissley said. "I might have an hour-long conversation with somebody, which Amazon would not consider an efficient use of my time. But I consider it not only a pleasure but actually core to my business."

Like Edwin Lindo at Estelita's Library, Nissley said his store is there for his community.

As profitable as Amazon has become — Nissley quipped the online retailer has forgotten they even sell books at this point — communities across the country have kept their local bookstores open.

Recall the figures Hunter cited: In 2019, the American Booksellers Association had 1,887 members, down from more than 5,500 in 1995. But by 2025, that number was back up to 3,281, according to the Association.

"In a world increasingly driven by billionaires and algorithms — and in an industry threatened by the politicization of books — the passion, purpose, and authenticity of independent bookstores matter more than ever," Allison Hill, the CEO of the American Booksellers Association, said in the organization's annual report.

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It's not all good news, though.

Even as the American Booksellers Association celebrated its growth, Hill acknowledged "thin margins, rising costs, and Amazon’s chokehold on our industry, and urgent threats that shook the very foundation of our work as the right to read and access books faced sustained, coordinated attacks."

In other words, keeping independent bookstores' doors open is tough.

Just this week, Ada's Technical Books announced the shop will close in June, ending 16 years of business in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

"Ada’s started as a dream of a technical space that 'should' exist in Seattle — a place for community and curiosity," the shop's owner and founder Danielle Hulton wrote on Instagram. "We are so proud of what we built together, but I’ve reached a season of life where I need to prioritize my family and new career goals."

In an email to KUOW, Hulton said the move "is definitely not a comment on businesses or bookstores as a whole" and reiterated that it's just time for a change.

And Ada's isn't done with its work just yet.

The shop is participating in Independent Bookstore Day celebrations from April 25 to May 4. Ambitious indie bookstore customers who want to be a declared a champion will have to visit all 33 Seattle-area stores and collect stamps to get a one-time, 25% discount at each of the participating stores. Readers who can't make it to all 33 shops can hit five or more to get a 25% coupon good at any one of the participating stores.

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Ada's, like other local bookstores, has also directed digital customers to Bookshop.org as well as Libro.fm, which shares profits from audiobook sales with independent shops.

Whatever method customers choose, Tom Nissley just hopes people support their local bookstores — on Independent Bookstore Day and every day.

"Every store is different, and people have different situations and different rent," he said. "But the first year we did [Independent] Bookstore Day, there were 19 stores. Now, we're at 33. We are, in our various ways, surviving and thriving."