Last October, the owners of Vertigo Books issued an ultimatum: The store would close if its business did not improve.
Customers responded and sales picked up during the holiday season, but it was “not enough to dig us out of the hole we’re in financially and make us sustainable into the future,” said Bridget Warren, who co-owns the store with her husband.
The final announcement came Friday: Everything in the store is 20 percent off as Vertigo empties its inventory. It will close at the end of next week.
Vertigo, which was founded 17 years ago in Washington and moved to the College Park Shopping Center in 2000, was the city’s only independent bookstore. Its loss, officials and customers say, symbolizes the struggles faced by locally owned businesses and by bookstores nationwide.
Bookstores across the country have also faced the problem of competing against big-box chains Borders and Barnes & Noble and against Amazon.com, the online giant. Since the early 1990s, the number of independent bookstores in the U.S. has fallen from over 6,000 to around 2,200, according to the American Booksellers Association.Vertigo had witnessed this trend first-hand. When the store originally opened in Washington, they were one of several small bookstores on their block. Most of them are now closed.
But Warren said it was Amazon, not the chains, that ultimately led to Vertigo’s final chapter. Fewer people were reading, she said, and those who did were shopping online.
“All the independent [bookstores] that are around now have survived Borders’ big expansion,” she said. “It’s Amazon that’s really hurt us.”John Pease, a university sociology professor who lobbies for textbook reform, said many faculty members – especially in the English and women’s studies departments – liked to support Vertigo by having their students buy their books there. Stewart said about 30 classes per semester picked up books from his store.
But even Pease said he prefers the convenience of ordering books online or getting them from libraries, and he likes to give his students the opportunity to buy their books used.
“Everyone’s buying books online, and the need to go to a bookstore to browse has greatly diminished,” Pease said.
But customers who were wandering around the store Saturday with stacks of books in their arms said shopping online just isn’t the same.
“I like to look at books. It’s worth it to me to drive to a store to look at a book,” said Marianne Rankin, of University Park, who said she met her husband in a bookstore and has been shopping at Vertigo since it opened. “I think real bookstores have a place.”
Customers said they have also appreciated the personal attention they’ve received from the Vertigo staff members, who learn their individual interests to provide recommendations.
They also liked the store’s big selection – 17,000 different titles as of Saturday, Stewart said – of locally written or otherwise unique books Vertigo has traditionally stocked instead of just a few big names.
“Bestsellers are not what bookstores are for,” said Luigi Boschetti, another longtime Vertigo loyalist. “Go into any supermarket and you can find the bestsellers.”
“This will be the only college town without a bookstore,” he added.
But it’s easier for many people to support the idea of College Park having a small locally owned bookstore than for them to actually spend their money at one, Warren said.
“Vertigo Books simply cannot survive only on good wishes and fond thoughts,” she and Stewart wrote on the store’s website in October.
The same is true of any locally owned business, Warren added. If College Park residents aren’t going to support existing businesses, she said, new ones will be discouraged from moving in.
Stephanie Stullich, a College Park District 3 Councilwoman and regular Vertigo customer, said the bookstore’s closing highlights the need for the sort of “buy-local” campaign she has long been advocating.
“What we really need to do is encourage people to ask themselves: ‘If I save a dollar by buying online, is it worth it if it drives out the businesses I want?'” Stullich said.
It was a question she had to come to terms with herself, Stullich added.
“I used to think that Vertigo was a great business and still buy books at Amazon because it was so easy,” she said. “Then I realized I was part of the problem, and I now make a conscious effort to always shop there.”
District 4 Councilwoman Mary Cook agreed the city should promote the advantages of such businesses to its residents.
“I think what the owners and staff of Vertigo Books have been trying to tell us is that we need to be spending our dollars in College Park,” Cook said. “And I don’t think that we as mayor and council have done a very good job getting this message out to people.”
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