Business

Sidewalk Booksellers Still in Business

By Shreya Paul

Staff writer

At the start of his workday, on the corner of East 14^th Street and Irving Place, Carlos Espada transfers books from cardboard and plastic boxes to a folding table and upside-down milk crates he’s arranged on the sidewalk. The books are for sale. He and his wife, Karina Gushiken, have spent the last four years making a living this way.

“Selling books is easy but you gotta do a lot of work,” he said.

He does have competition. Bookselling giant Barnes & Noble runs a store just two blocks away. The Strand bookstore, a Greenwich Village icon and a New York City historic landmark, The Strand is two blocks away in the opposite direction. Another sidewalk bookseller is cater-cornered across the street, where subway riders spill onto Union Square.

In March 2019, Espada lowered his prices, so he could compete. Everything now costs $1.

Overall, bookstore sales in the United States have plummeted at least since 2007. Sixty-two percent of respondents to a 2017 eMarketer survey said they preferred purchasing books online to buying them in-store.

Espada said he sells about 175 books a day to about 60 customers, including some of his regulars. He’s won regular customers by engaging them in various ways, he said. “Sometimes I read a little chapter to them. We become friends and they come every other day.”

Sometimes, his customers even donate books for him to sell.

But his book business, he added, is less about making money than about inspiring others to read. The share of Americans who read for pleasure daily fell 29.2 percent in 2003 to 19 percent in 2017, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey.

That decline doesn’t bother Espada. “I ain’t gonna feel bad. I’m just gonna keep doing what I am doing. That’s what I like. I encourage [people] to read.”

Sometimes, Espada said, he gives away free books to individuals who are too poor to buy his books or aren’t fully literate.

“I look out for all of them because a lot of people can’t afford books,” he said.

Also in the Village, on the corner of Greene and West 4th Streets, David Manso and Zachary Aptekar set up 10 folding tables filled with assorted used books. The two friends have been selling books on the streets of Manhattan for more than 20 years, they said.

“New York City has always had street vendors. There used to be a lot more secondhand book vendors and they are mostly gone,” said Manso. “We are what’s left.”

Manso said the rising popularity of online book sales and the decline in reading threaten the future of sidewalk booksellers. To continue making money, Manso and Aptekar began selling books on Amazon in the early 2000s. That was a necessary move, even if they aren’t satisfied with Amazon’s seller support system. “Amazon, I need. But there are so many things I don’t like about it,” Aptekar said.

He also doesn’t like the fact that fewer Americans are reading books. “That’s their loss, that’s unfortunate. There is wonderful stuff to read,” said Aptekar. “There is not enough time in one life to read all the good things.”

Caroline Peacock, a University of California at Santa Barbara undergrad who was visiting New York, happened upon Aptekar’s sidewalk collection of hardcovers, stacks of literary classics, and rows of novels with weathered, yellowed pages. Though she didn’t start her day with book-buying on her list of things to do, she purchased several tomes.

She shares Aptekar’s book-loving sentiments.

“You can literally stay in your one little place and, if you are reading books, you can experience all sorts of different walks of life,” she said. “Books preserve everything. [They are] kind of a testament to… the capabilities of mankind.”