Publishers Weekly ranked the 50 states by bookstores per capita, including independents (like Boswell Book Company, Mystery One and Books & Company in Oconomowoc), chains and “big-box” stores. Wisconsin came in at 32nd place and our numbers break down thusly:
Ranked last is New Jersey, which has one bookstore for about every 40,000 people, and fewer bookstores than Wisconsin but about three million more people.
Last week at Book Expo America, an annual meeting of just about everyone in the book business, Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, said that independents were doing fine and that sales were up in 2012. This could mean that those tallies will stay just about the same in the short term. But with last January’s announcement that Barnes & Noble will be closing a third of its stores over the next decade, the numbers are likely set to decline again.
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