A record number of 77 independent bookshops across nine different regions and countries have been named regional and country finalists for Independent Bookshop of the Year at the British Book Awards (the Nibbies) this year, the Bookseller reported. The prize, which is sponsored by Gardners and supported by the Booksellers Association, celebrates bookshops at the center of local communities. See the complete list of finalists here.
Regional and country winners will be released March 12, then contend for the overall prize, which will be announced May 13 at a ceremony in London. The overall Independent Bookshop of the Year winner will also be in the running to be crowned Book Retailer of the Year.
BA executive director Meryl Halls posted on social media: "We are so incredibly lucky to have this range and richness in our indie bookselling sector. Every one of them adds to their town center, builds readers, creates places worth visiting and enhances the cultural and social life of their community. We salute and celebrate them all!"
Tom Tivnan, managing editor at the Bookseller, commented: "One of the things that is driven home by the selection process for this award is how lucky book buyers in the UK and Ireland are as we are truly in an independent bookshop renaissance. This year's cohort is one of the strongest I have seen in my 15 years judging this award. Indies have come out of the pandemic and into a cost-of-living and business rates crises, yet still through innovation and creativity thrive as never before."
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"From Tokyo and Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Amsterdam and New York, members of the Chinese diaspora are building public lives that are forbidden in China and training themselves to be civic-minded citizens--the type of Chinese the Communist Party doesn't want them to be. They are opening Chinese bookstores, holding seminars and organizing civic groups," the New York Times reported.
Four Chinese bookstores opened in Tokyo last year. In Taiwan, Anne Jieping Zhang, a mainland-born journalist who worked in Hong Kong for two decades before leaving during the pandemic, started a bookstore in Taipei in 2022. She opened a branch in Chiang Mai, Thailand, last December and is planning to open bookshops in Tokyo and Amsterdam this year.
"I want my bookstore to be a place where Chinese all over the world can come and exchange ideas," said Zhang, whose Nowhere bookstore issues passports of the Republic of Nowhere to its valued customers, who are called citizens, not members.
Nowhere's Taipei branch held 138 events last year. The Chiang Mai branch held about 20 events in its first six weeks. Zhang said she didn't want her bookstores to be only for dissidents and young rebels, but for any Chinese person who is curious about the world.
"What matters is not what you oppose but what kind of life you desire," she said. "If the Chinese or the Chinese diaspora cannot rebuild a society in places without top-down restrictions, even if we undergo a change of regime, we definitely won't be able to lead better lives."
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Romantasy, a subgenre that combines romance and fantasy, is seeing runaway success in Canada, as it is elsewhere. CBC Radio's Day 6 reported that book publishers and industry watchers are "taking note of both the genre's enormous popularity among young female readers, and the power of #BookTok, the hashtag used on TikTok to discuss books, to elevate its traditionally published writers and self-published indie authors alike."
"You're seeing the progression of our generation who love those YA books like The Hunger Games and Twilight, and now we're growing up and we are older, so the material that we want is, you know, a bit more mature," Nicola MacNaughton, co-owner of Slow Burn Books in Calgary, Alberta, told Day 6. "And the nice thing, too: you have that guaranteed happily ever after," she added. "You know that the author is going to put you through a lot. But at the end of the day, they're going to put you back together and make you whole again."
MacNaughton said she and her sister, Shannon, who opened the store less than a year ago to meet growing demand for romance books in general, have noticed in their bookstore the power of social media to fuel sales: "The nice thing about BookTok and Bookstagram is that you don't have to be traditionally published to get your book out there and to have people know about it. That's really made it a lot more democratized in the marketing of books." --Robert Gray