4 April 2022
Last October, while Amazon opened its first four-star stores in the UK, more than 500 book and publishing industry professionals gathered for a two-day conference called "Reimagining Bookstores". Led by Praveen Madan, a former big-tech consultant and current CEO of Kepler's Books (a 67-year-old bookstore in the heart of Silicon Valley), the conversation acknowledged a fundamental truth about the current models of in-person bookselling: they cannot support the work of bookselling. In order for bookstores to thrive in the 21st century, we must rethink the whole enterprise.
