You came to buy a book. Maybe the new Grisham, or the memoir everyone's talking about. An hour later, the coffee at your elbow has gone cold, three books you had never heard of that morning are stacked in your lap, and a stranger two chairs over is halfway through something with a cracked spine.
It's the appeal of an independent bookstore, but it's not the most efficient business model. You go to one to sit there for an hour or so. And sitting there is free.
Everyone who walks into Underground Books on Harrison Boulevard in Ogden gets the same line from owner D.S. Andersen. "Welcome to your new favorite bookstore." The ground floor is a couch and worn paperbacks. Upstairs, there is an octagonal bumper pool table where people run Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and a collection of antique and thrifted chairs Andersen tested himself to make sure they were comfortable for reading.
Andersen wants a lunch counter in the cluttered corner so Weber State students can come do homework. He told KUER's Macy Lipkin last week that he does not stock every title and does not consider that a problem. He may not have the book you want. He is certain he can find the book you need. For that, he said, he has been called a book doula.
Andersen is an Ogden native who came to bookselling from botany. He soft-opened the store in 2025 and, as of April, was planning a proper grand opening for the end of the month once renovations were finished. There is an open poetry night every month, on the Thursday closest to the new moon.
Downtown, two romance-first shops opened about two weeks apart. Nicole Trahan opened The Romantics Archive on Historic 25th Street on Nov. 1, 2025, with a conference table, a nook of couches, a courtyard and a rack of books wrapped in paper for a blind date. She had spent the previous summer running pop-ups at festivals, she told the Deseret News, building a following before she committed to a lease.
Chapter & Charm followed two weeks later, starting inside The Monarch, the downtown arts space, and moving to its own Washington Boulevard storefront in the spring. Megan Braswell co-founded it with a close friend. They were always driving to Salt Lake, she told KUER, so they decided to go for it. The larger space and the foot traffic have been good enough that they are bringing on a third employee this summer. When Braswell does not have what a customer is after, she sends them around the corner to the competition, and the competition sends people back.
Two used bookstores at Newgate Mall are also doing fine. Eborn Books is one. A Novel Idea Book Parlor is the other, in a space that used to be a dress shop, walls painted pink and green and covered in flowers. Cornel Thomas bought the business in 2023. His father was a librarian. He does not think of the new shops as competition, he told KUER, because the more people read, the better it goes for everyone, and there are enough books to go around.
Ogden has no bookstore chain other than Deseret Book. The nearest Barnes & Noble is more than ten miles up the freeway in Layton.
A count nobody keeps
Nine bookstores have opened in Utah since the start of 2025, and three have closed, going by membership in the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association. KUER flagged the figure as an undercount, and the mechanism is easy to see. A store only appears in that tally if it pays to join, and MPIBA membership starts at $200 a year.
The shape shows up in other places. More than 20 Utah stores signed up for Independent Bookstore Day in April, from Billie Books in Vernal to First Edition in Tooele. Catherine Weller, co-owner of Weller Book Works, told the Deseret News that after years of watching stores disappear, the increase has been phenomenal, and that most of the people opening them are young. Her shop has been selling books in Salt Lake City since Gustav Weller turned his secondhand furniture store into Zion's Bookstore in 1929.
The newest arrival is not in Ogden or Salt Lake at all. Shaylee Allred opened Love and Lore Books in Huntington this month, in a part of Emery County where the nearest bookstore had been an hour's drive away.
Nationally, the American Booksellers Association counted 3,783 member locations at the end of 2025, up from 2,547 in 2021. Six hundred and five bookstores opened last year. Sixty-five closed. In the same letter in which she called it a banner year, ABA chief executive Allison Hill called 2025 the most challenging year for independent bookstores on record, citing rising costs, tariffs, book bans, free speech harassment, and Amazon.
Both things are true, and the second one explains why the first is stranger than it looks.
The hour is free
Americans are reading less every year. A study published in iScience last August followed 236,270 respondents to the American Time Use Survey between 2003 and 2023 and found the share of Americans who read for pleasure on an average day falling from 28 percent to about 16 percent. The decline runs at roughly 3 percent a year. The lowest rate in the twenty years measured was the last one.
Sales have not made up the difference. Print unit sales came in at 762.4 million in 2025, three-tenths of one percent above 2024 and about nine percent below the 2021 peak of 839.7 million. Over the same four years, ABA membership grew by nearly half, while the number of print books Americans bought went down.
Romance is the closest thing the industry has to good news, and it is where the building has been fastest. The ABA counts 232 romance bookstores opened across the country in the past three years, 58 in 2024 and 120 in 2025 alone. Salt Lake City got Lovebound Library in 2024. Ogden got two in a fortnight.
The category they are all betting on had a strange year. In June of 2025, Circana reported romance print sales running 24 percent ahead year-to-date, with 51 million units in the trailing twelve months, making it the leading growth category in the entire print market. When the year closed, BookScan put romance up 3.9 percent, at just under 44 million units, with fantasy down 8.7 percent.
Which brings you to the margins. The ABA's ABACUS survey, the nearest thing the trade has to a financial physical, collected 2024 results from 504 bookstore companies across 601 locations. Sales rose 5.8 percent. Net profit margin rose from 0.6 percent to 1.3 percent, which the association reported as a positive indication for the channel. It is. It also means independent bookselling clears a bit over a penny on the dollar, and a broken furnace is an event.
So the stores are not really selling books, and the booksellers will tell you so. Trahan put it to the Deseret News about as plainly as it can be put. You can get books anywhere, she said. The big retailers are selling books. "And we're not selling books. We're selling basically a community of people."
The ABA's own report describes the same arrangement from the accounting side: independent bookstores run on one of the smallest profit margins in any industry, and they supplement it with local art, games, toys, bars and cafes. Event ticketing on the association's e-commerce platform grew from 17,000 tickets to 23,000 in a year.
You can see it in Ogden without a spreadsheet. Chapter & Charm throws book bedazzling parties where customers decorate their own copies, and has release parties planned for Rebecca Yarros and the indie author Abigail Morgan. Braswell said people come in and tell her they do not have any bookish friends, and she tells them to come to an event. Underground Books has the game room, the poetry night, the tested chairs. A Novel Idea has a local author section and somebody behind the counter who will talk to you about what you are reading.
All of which depends on a customer being able to wander in without doing arithmetic first, and Ogden just changed that math. Paid parking arrived downtown on June 22, covering 25th Street between Wall Avenue and Washington Boulevard at $1.50 an hour. The Romantics Archive is at 290 25th Street, inside that stretch. The city shelved the plan in 2024 after business owners objected and residents circulated a petition, then brought it back with a free fifteen-minute window and a discount for employees.
On the first day, two of the shoppers KUER interviewed said they expect to come downtown less often now. A dollar fifty is not much. It is enough to make you decide in advance how long you intend to stay.
Andersen said opening a bookstore was a crazy idea and that he is fine not making a fortune on it. He wants to keep some books in the building for people who cannot afford to buy them or have nowhere to put them. What he was after, he said, was the vibe and the smell and the vast range of titles and the sense of discovery, a place where everything is not hyper-categorized and you have to explore.
He was describing somewhere to sit. Whether that is a business, Ogden will know soon enough.
Article edited by Clint Betts. What are we missing? What did this piece get wrong? Email the editor at clint@utahn.com.
