//How bookstores are weathering the pandemic

How bookstores are weathering the pandemic

Customers browse at Rodney’s Book Store in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 3, 2020. | Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Independent bookstores are doing everything they can to stay in business.

The pandemic arrived early for Emily Powell, owner of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. The state had one of the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the US in February. As she watched more cases pop up across the country, “I felt an increasing sense of panic and crisis,” she said. On March 15, she abruptly closed her stores in the middle of the day. She immediately shrank her staff from 500 to 60 who were “just helping us turn the lights off and put out-of-office messages on the website.” Almost overnight, she shifted her business entirely to online orders.

She’s since been able to bring back around