Talk:List of independent bookstores

Need references

the following store names were removed, as they didnt have references. if someone wants to first research them, find refs, then add them back in, great, but dont add names first w/o refs.Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:32, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

• Argo Bookshop in Montreal, Quebec
• Booksmarts Canada in Kitchener, Ontario
• The Word in Montreal, Quebec
• Books for Cooks, Melbourne, specialist exclusively wine, food & cookbooks
• The Bookshelf in Guelph, Ontario
• Nicholas Hoare in Toronto, Ontario, Ottawa, Ontario and Montreal, QC
• Words Worth Books in Waterloo, Ontario

Merge proposal

Having both List of independent bookstores and List of bookstore chains seems like an unnecessary hard distinction to me. I've tried to rationalize the current distinction by drawing a line at 3 or less/4 or more stores, but this is kind of arbitrary and can think of good arguments for picking some other number or criterion. I think a good solution is to merge to a single page; we could mark things as "single store"/"small chain"/"large chain" to be more descriptive than a binary "independent" versus "chain" distinction. I'm not even sure the independent/chain distinction is the best way to categorize bookshops. The combined list would not too long, we would move the US chain shops into List of independent bookstores in the United States. 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 06:15, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Looking more into this, a large number of bookstores (not all of them) in the USA are members of trade associations which explicitly call themselves "independent" or "indie" like American Booksellers Association. The director of the Independent Booksellers Consortium defines "independently owned" as "not owned by a publicly-traded corporation". This is kind of useless as a working definition though. Barnes & Noble is not owned by a publicly-traded corporation! 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 05:43, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

A found somebody's personal website attempting to think about what a comprehensive list of bookstores would look like. Of course, Wikipedia is not a directory, so we are not here to actually build a full list. But it describes exactly the kind of line that is drawn implicitly by choosing which Wikipedia list bookstores belong to. 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 02:57, 6 December 2024 (UTC)