In a memorable scene from the ’90s rom-com “You’ve Got Mail,” independent bookseller Kathleen Kelly, played by Meg Ryan, and her two employees stand outside a chain bookstore about to open around the corner from their smaller shop. Kelly tries to convince herself that the stores can not only coexist, but might even boost each other’s sales. One of her employees, who thinks otherwise, sums the feeling up briefly: “Quel nightmare.”
The nearly 30-year-old scene could play out today in the East Village, where Barnes & Noble plans to open a new location next month at Avenue A and East 11th Street — across the street from an independent bookstore called The Rabbit Books and Bar, and walking distance from several others in a neighborhood that prides itself on its local businesses. All this, as Amazon continues to dominate the print book market.
Is it a nightmare? Just like in “You’ve Got Mail,” it depends on who you ask.
Marianna Vaidman Stone, who opened The Rabbit with her daughter this past summer, is surprisingly upbeat about the shop’s soon-to-be neighbor: “To have two similar businesses on a street corner makes it a little bit of a destination for people who are interested in that sort of thing,” she told Gothamist. “I’m hoping it will be a multiplier effect.”
This is the narrative Barnes & Noble prefers. Janine Flanigan, a B&N employee of 41 years who currently serves as vice president of store design, said “a true book buyer” won’t just stop at a visit to the chain store.
“If there are five bookstores on a block, you are walking into each and every one of those bookstores looking for that gem,” she said. “Every one has somebody who has a different kind of specialty or something else that they love and that they’re passionate about, and they’re putting all of these new things in front of you.”
The Rabbit Books and Bar
Sonia Rao for Gothamist
Lulu Mourning and Nika Voron, who opened Afterword Bookshop on East Sixth Street last December, also remain optimistic: “We created our business model and set up our point of view so we’re not necessarily competing with Barnes & Noble,” Mourning explained, referring to the carefully curated collection on display in their roughly 700-square-foot store. “If we’re not losing business to the other bookstores in the neighborhood, if we’re not losing that much to The Strand … I’m not particularly freaked out.”
After speaking to Gothamist on a recent afternoon, Mourning returned to the front desk to speak with a customer lingering nearby. The woman told Mourning that Afterword had been on her list of places to visit: “I just love small bookstores,” she said.
She isn’t alone in the sentiment. Riding this wave of hope, more than 420 independent bookstores opened across the country in 2025, according to the American Booksellers Association. That represents a 31% increase from the previous year.
How long they last will depend on the market — and perhaps how much tenacity their owners have. The East Village has managed to support several specialty bookstores, including Pillow-Cat Books, which sells stories about animals, and Village Works, which offers books on New York City’s history and culture. One of the most vocal defenders of the neighborhood’s local businesses is Bonnie Slotnick, who runs her namesake cookbook store (which you might recall from a recent dust-up).
Slotnick, who relocated her store from the West Village to the East Village more than a decade ago, doesn’t think people in her current neighborhood will go for a chain store like Barnes & Noble. 7-Eleven tried and failed to gain a foothold in the East Village, she said. The Starbucks on Avenue A and St. Mark’s Place, just a few blocks from where the Barnes & Noble will be, closed its doors just a couple of weeks ago.
Besides, Slotnick said, if people wanted to order books from corporations, wouldn’t they just go for Amazon and its one-click purchasing? (We live in a world of technology beyond anything the AOL-addicted Kathleen Kelly could have imagined.)
“In my building, I see a pile of Amazon packages,” Slotnick said. “I never see any packages from Barnes & Noble.”
The future site of the East Village Barnes and Noble
Sonia Rao for Gothamist
Other East Village booksellers painted a more nuanced dynamic between their shops and private equity-backed companies like Barnes & Noble and Amazon, the biggest e-commerce player across industries. While Erin Neary of Book Club Bar said the new Barnes & Noble opening is “just one more thing that’s frankly going to make it a little harder for businesses that are already really tough to operate,” she also expressed her belief that “ taking e-commerce money away from Amazon is always a win.”
Village Works owner Joseph Sheridan, who has lived in the East Village since 1983, agreed that “Barnes & Noble isn’t as hated as they used to be, at least not by me, because I saw so many Barnes & Nobles close because of Amazon.”
Sheridan has adopted a rather pragmatic, wait-and-see approach to the entire debacle. He remembers when it was a major faux pas to be seen shopping at the Gap on St. Mark’s Place because it was considered too mainstream for a neighborhood full of punks. At the time, he said, he thought the street would be completely resistant to any more chain stores. But now, he runs his bookstore across the street from a Sephora.
In “You’ve Got Mail,” the new chain bookstore does contribute to Kathleen Kelly eventual move to close up shop. She finds happiness by writing children’s books and dating the big-box store’s owner. But that’s a movie.
While Sheridan doubts everyone in the modern retelling will walk off into the sunset with Barnes & Noble, he has taken a cue from Kelly’s acceptance. He isn’t celebrating the new store opening nearby, but he isn’t losing any sleep over it, either.
“If they make it, they make it,” he said. “If they don’t, they don’t.”