BookHampton has been a mainstay of the Long Island, New York, community of East Hampton for more than 40 years. Carolyn Brody fondly remembers the cozy, cluttered bookshop from many rainy-day visits when her children were young. “It was beloved,” she says. But beloved didn’t pay the bills, and by 2015, after decades of pressure from big chains and the internet, the small, independent store was on the verge of closing. That’s when Brody, a New Yorker who spends her summers in the Hamptons, stepped in. “I didn’t want to live in a town without a bookstore,” she says. “It’s every bit a part of a community as a bank or a grocery store or a hardware store.”
As she surveyed her new business in early 2016, however, Brody knew the East Hampton icon couldn’t remain trapped in amber. To survive, BookHampton needed to adapt to a bookselling environment its original owners never envisioned. As other independent booksellers before her had discovered, Brody realized that the store could never compete with its bigger rivals on price or—with just 1,000 square feet of space—on selection. Pleas to the community to support the business as if it were a nonprofit enterprise, a tactic tried by a previous owner, was another untenable option. BookHampton needed to sell something that its competitors could not.
