The Story of the Dying Indie Bookstore Doesn’t Apply to The Word

Amazon’s fear-mongering over the book industry has come and gone. Large bookstore retailers like Indigo, while still dominating sales, haven’t managed to dismantle the independent bookstore scene. By and large, however, the belief that local booksellers are under attack persists.

But for The Word, a small independent bookstore that has operated out of its teal-brick storefront for the past 50 years, these existential threats have never distracted from its core mission.

“We’ve really always put community first, and that community has sustained us through the years,” says now-owner Brendan King-Edwards, the son of The Word’s founders Adrian King-Edwards and Lucille Friesen. “It hasn't really felt like a struggle—it’s kind of felt like a privilege, to be honest,” he continued before explaining The Word’s crowdfunding initiative unveiled in April earlier this year aimed to and raised $50,000 to restore the historical storefront’s façade by July.

The campaign was successful enough that an anonymous donor matched every dollar given to the One Word campaign, up to $25,000.

It never was David vs. Goliath

The stories told by headlines about a sudden “resurgence” in independent bookstores are often highly misleading. Bookstores indeed faced decline from the late 1990s to the early 2000s as online storefronts and e-reading changed consumer habits and big corporations began monopolizing book purchasing. In Montreal, many stores struggled to compete for visibility and accessibility up until the late 2010s.

What many don’t know is that this decline really ended sixteen years ago, when, in 2009, the number of independent bookstores began to climb. According to King-Edwards, the local bookstore trajectory “was never really this David versus Goliath story.”

“I think that dynamic [has been] set up in the mainstream media for a long time, and repeated, about big corporations versus independent bookstores,” he stated. The most recent hardship facing independent booksellers was the pandemic. Montrealters may remember Librairie Olivieri, a Côte-des-Neiges staple that shut its doors for good in 2020 due to the impact of lockdown and real estate development. During the pandemic, surviving storefronts were forced to rely on e-commerce and social media to reach their consumers.

Despite these struggles, independent bookstores persevered, and in 2025, the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association estimated 50 prospective bookstores to open.

For King-Edwards, “The challenges often that I would point to are related to perception and discussions in the media, where people, for a long time, were convinced that nobody was reading anymore [and] that bookstores were going to die out.”