A Harrisburg News piece written by Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness book reviewer extraordinaire, focuses how the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pa., fared during the pandemic, when its doors were shut to customers for more than 400 days.
While the store's online sales efforts before Covid-19 had focused on used book, as the pandemic started, it "pivoted to sales of new ones as customers, eager for fresh reading material during the pandemic, enthusiastically embraced online book buying," Freedenberg wrote.
The store moved its calendar of author readings and interviews onto Zoom and "significantly expand their frequency, occasionally featuring two events in a single evening. The bookstore became one of the first in the country to make the shift--within a week of the shutdown--and, by the time of the re-opening, it had presented some 150 of these programs."
According to manager Alex Brubaker, a typical event drew about 200 viewers and several attracted audiences of more than 1,000 from around the world. It also drew some authors who likely would not have made an in-person appearance at the store.
Another important move: beginning in May 2020, the Midtown Scholar began holding weekly sidewalk sales on Fridays and Saturdays. "These allowed customers to maintain their physical connection to the store, even if they couldn't enter to browse the shelves or sip a latte from the café."
Still, Brubaker says that the pandemic taught him that nothing will replace the in-person book browsing experience: "If anything, it confirmed what I do for a living and that independent bookstores need to be here as physical locations in order to grow a literary community," he said. "Once that was taken away, it made me realize how important that is to a community."