Fresno-area used bookstores stay alive in the Age of Amazon

When Shirley Hart was ready to retire after running Hart’s Haven Books for almost 20 years, she faced a daunting challenge: In the Age of Amazon, who wants to buy a used bookstore?

For months, she looked to sell. An architect was interested in the Tower District building, and a midwife wanted it as a birthing center, she says. But no one wanted a bookstore.

“Bookstores are becoming dinosaurs,” Hart says.

But Hart’s Haven got a second chance this year when Barbara Rogers, who already ran an online bookstore, stepped in to buy the operation.

Now Rogers is trying some new offerings to keep the old bookstore going. It’s more challenging than ever for a used bookstore to survive, Rogers says. Keeping hers alive won’t be easy, she acknowledges.

Her solution is to offer Jazzercise classes, which she has taught for three years. There will be two morning classes before the bookstore opens and two in the evening after it closes.

“It has to be paired with something else … like the quintessential coffee shop,” Rogers says. “It’s a good complement to another business. But standalone is tricky.”

Hart’s Haven at 950 N. Van Ness Ave. is one of just a handful of used bookstores that remain in the Fresno-Clovis area. It started almost 20 years ago in the Tower District when Hart was still teaching.

There were several bookstores in the Tower District then, one next to Piemonte’s Deli and another across from Chicken Pie Shop, with people able to flit from one to another. But Hart’s Haven is the only one left, Hart says.

Like Hart, Scott Brown, owner of Book Nook in northeast Fresno, says he’s seen the number of used bookstores in town dwindle. Now it’s just his store and Hart’s Haven. There’s also a used bookstore in Clovis.

Brown says he bought Book Nook at 6735 N. First St. seven years ago from its previous owner, who opened it in the early 1990s.

Luck plays a big part in a bookstore’s survival, Brown says, noting that his happens to be located near restaurants and a gym and therefore gets a lot of traffic. Book Nook also keeps later hours than other used bookstores, closing at 8 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and giving people with a standard 9-to-5 job two or three hours to come in and browse, Brown says.

He sells mainly paperback fiction, not as a chosen specialty but because there’s little room in the store for anything else. With only so much space to work with, the stock is often thinned out, with items that need to be cleared out placed in bargain bins.

Keeping the business afloat has its challenges — some customers come in expecting thrift-store prices, or forgo going into bookstores altogether for the ease of e-books, Brown says.

“I still do good business here. It’s kind of hit-and-miss.”

Peggy Dunklee owns A Book Barn in Clovis, and she agrees that the market for used books remains strong.

“People are still reading,” she says.

Her 7,000-square-foot, two-story store at 640 Clovis Ave. has been there for four years, and before that it was around the corner on Fifth Street for 10 years.

The store does a lot of community outreach, from donating unwanted books to Friends of the Library to having open mic nights, readings for children, summer reading programs and local author book signings, she says.

The store also has a 7,000-square-foot warehouse, filled with used books. The plan was to move into a bigger store and jettison the warehouse, but instead Dunklee kept both the store and the warehouse.

A Book Barn has its inventory online, so customers can buy books from home and either pick them up in the store or have them shipped at additional charge. It offers a lot of variety for customers, she says. Customers can come in looking to complete their collection or buy books they read years ago for their children.

“It’s a very emotional experience for people,” Dunklee says.

Greg Bamber says he goes about three or four times a year into A Book Barn to browse, saving specific books he wants for online orders.

“If you really love books, it doesn’t matter whether the book is new,” he says. “A used book almost has more character to it … it’s something that has a life to it.”

Hut Landon, executive director of Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, says that Amazon has changed the book-selling scene and everyone in the business has to deal with it, whether they sell new or used books. Low cost is a big appeal of buying books used, but Amazon discounts at a loss that bookstores can’t match, he says.

Like Dunklee’s Clovis store, some used bookstores have gotten smart and sell online as well, sometimes through Amazon, he says. An online presence is important to promote the business, he adds.

Landon says people who run bookstores need to run them as a business, not as an ideal job that will let owners sit behind a cash register and read books, talking to about 10 people a day who happen to wander in. Lots of bookstores in the last 10 years have gone under because they weren’t handled as a business, he says.

Hart’s Haven is one that survived on just selling books.

Shirley Hart had a lot of books at her home, collected over the years. She had always wanted a bookstore, so she emptied her garage of books to sell as inventory.

The store has an eclectic collection, from children’s chapter books in the back to mystery books and spiritual writings in the front. She did have sci fi at one point, but she sold much of it to Book Nook, Hart says.

Part of the used bookstore’s lasting appeal may have been Hart herself. Regulars who came in for years say she became a friend of theirs through the store. Rogers, the store’s new owner, says the first time she came in, the store instantly felt homey and Hart welcomed her in what was “almost like an angel’s voice.”

Rogers met Hart when she came in to help price books, and kept coming in over the years. The thought to buy the shop occurred to her in January, and she offered in March. April, May and June were spent shadowing Hart to see how she ran the store.

Rogers’ relationship with bookselling began when she bought a storage unit full of books at an auction and started selling them online. She has sold books on Amazon for about 12 years, making about $20,000 to $80,000 a year, and will continue selling books on Amazon from Hart’s Haven, although the two businesses will remain separate as they are different beasts to manage, she says.

Rogers isn’t looking to change much of Hart’s Haven — she wants to put in wood flooring and a stage for the Jazzercise classes she’ll hold in the back and add more bookshelves to the shop’s front. She wants to keep the community feel of the business “the way (Hart) grew it.”

Rogers is looking to build up Hart’s Haven as a business by advertising with fliers, Facebook, radio spots and tables at Tower District events. She plans to reach out to the community with get-togethers at Hart’s Haven, from local author signings and book clubs to summer reading programs and reading sessions.

She’s also trying to clear her inventory with a month-long sale of $3 for a box of books, as she has 2,000 boxes, or about 100,000 books, of new stock arriving in August. She wants to get them on the shelves as quickly as she can.

“I love the fact that books are so accessible these days,” she says. “Whereas like 100, 200 years ago, it was more the wealthy people (who) had access to books.”

This story was originally published July 11, 2015 at 6:45 AM with the headline "Fresno-area used bookstores stay alive in the Age of Amazon."