While chain stores are taking over much of the rest of the United States, independent booksellers in the Bay Area have been able to stay in business, thanks to a vehemently anti-chain public. So in September when Clark Kepler announced that he had to close his Menlo Park bookstore for financial reasons, adults and children alike came together with one goal in mind: Save Kepler’s Books.

San Francisco may be the birthplace of Levi’s and Gap, but most chain stores aren’t welcome here. Hayes Valley and the North Beach commercial area around Columbus Avenue recently became chain-store-free zones and in March 2005, Haight residents were able to stop Urban Outfitters from moving in. Fervent residents like Carl Pezold feel the same about local bookstores.

“In my mind, neighborhood bookstores have special protection in the pantheon of endangered businesses. A bookstore is a weather vane of the community’s intellectual direction. To have a marketing exec from Borders or Barnes & Noble define San Francisco's literary interests is like having McDonald's define our culinary tastes.”

According to the United States Commerce Department, Northern California is the nation’s second largest book-buying market (behind New York) with sales of more than $280 million a year. Three well-known bookstores in the Bay Area are good examples of how it’s thriving. City Lights, opened in 1953 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin, is alive and well; Kepler’s Books, forced to close for financial reasons last fall, was able to reopen before the rush of the holiday season thanks in part to the outpouring of community support; and Cody’s Books, a Berkeley institution with two locations in the East Bay, opened a two-story store on Stockton Street in late September.

Nevertheless, superstores such as Borders, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are still big threats and continued support from locals is essential to keeping independent sellers open.

“There’s no question that the amount of competition has increased over the last ten years, so supporting local bookstores, or local businesses in general, really is important,” said Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Bookseller Association.

“If you don’t support them, they are going to go away.”

Kepler’s needed the community’s help when hard times hit. In front of the store’s closed doors, neighbors honked their car horns and yelled in unison to get people’s attention. One loyal customer, Rick Opaterny, even started a blog (www.savekeplers.com) to keep people informed.

The store’s owners were touched by the community’s enthusiasm and willingness to help. Anne Banta, chief marketing officer at Kepler’s, feels indebted to the generosity of volunteers who helped the bookstore reopen, but she knows there’s still a lot of work to be done.

“To be honest, I’m concerned that everyone thinks, ‘Great, we renegotiated our lease and now everything’s OK.’ The issue is, we’re still not where we have to be,” she said.

Despite the store’s proximity to Borders, Ross sounds optimistic.

“The response has been great. Everybody likes it. People want to have some kind of a choice when it comes to bookstores and it’s getting harder and harder these days. People like the space and the design, they like it being Cody’s,” he said.

Ross explains that in some places in the United States, residents don’t even know what a neighborhood bookstore is because most of them have gone out of business.

To keep up with consumer buying habits and new competitors – Target, Wal-Mart, and other big-box stores that are moving into booksellers’ turf – smaller bookstores have had to differentiate themselves from these newcomers.

Author events also are an important part of what makes a bookstore popular, but what customers may not realize is that each event costs about $1,000 in advertising and execution, according to Banta. So bookstore owners need to choose authors carefully.

“Like in fashion, you miss the look, you get stuck with the inventory,” she said.

“One of our great privileges here at City Lights is that, because of our history and our location, we can probably be more curatorial than almost any other store west of the Mississippi,” said City Lights buyer Paul Yamazaki. “By that I mean that we rely on ourselves to seek out what we consider the best of contemporary writing and publishing and bring that in a very focused way to the readers who come through the doors of City Lights. I think that over the years, we’ve developed almost a bond of trust with readers; if it’s on the shelves of City Lights, it’s there because one of the staff feels very strongly that it should be looked at and read.”

Andy Ross purchased Cody’s Books in 1977; last fall, he opened a third, two-story location on Stockton Street.

“This is tragic because these stores, in many cases, sort of defined local communities,” Ross said.

Yamazaki agrees. He said one of the great things about the Bay Area is that there’s a tremendous understanding of what it means to be an independent bookstore and what the difference is from a Barnes & Noble, Borders or Amazon.

“Our customers use all of those venues but they understand that if they don’t use local independents as their primary bookstore then that’s going to disappear, the pleasure of browsing will disappear as will other elements of what a street of good local businesses means to a community,” he said. “The fact that so many of us are still here, more than in almost any other major metropolitan area of the United States, is a testament to that understanding.”

Helene Goupil is a freelance writer, the co-author of San Francisco: The Unknown City (Arsenal Pulp Press, Oct. 2005), and the founding editor of InsideOut Travel magazine (insideoutmag.com).

UPDATE: On May 10, Cody's Books announced the closure of its oldest location on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Read the press release.