In the 1950s, Miami non-hispanic whites were more than 80% of the population. Now they are under 20%. To find a book store in Miami, you have to drive to a white area like Coral Gables.
If you go to an airport in Central and South America (with the exception of Argentina and Chile), you will rarely find anyone reading a book.
Why the lack of stores? No one is quite sure, but many factors may play a role, including high rents, a large non-English speaking population and the absence of a retail district with foot traffic sufficiently heavy and deep-pocketed to sustain the low-margin business of bookselling.
“It’s tough,” said Miami Book Fair co-founder Raquel Roque, owner of the tiny Downtown Book Center, which her father opened in 1965 after arriving from Cuba. Though she still carries some English-language books, newspapers and magazines, she said, “we’ve had to switch to Spanish to survive. It just reflects finances and the population.”
Her store’s clientele, she said, is mostly now recently arrived immigrants looking for English-instruction books and bargain novels. She keeps the doors open thanks to a thriving wholesale Spanish-language book distribution business.
Other Spanish-language bookstores in the city also look beyond a local clientele to Web sales. Customers for Libreria Universal’s broad stock of Cuba-related books are all over the country, said owner Juan Manuel Salvat.
The trend is clear, Salvat said: General-interest bookstores, especially those trading principally in English, have gone where the biggest concentrations of book-buyers are, in well-off enclaves like Pinecrest, Coral Gables and Aventura.
Census estimates tell part of the story. Book-buying is closely linked to education, experts say. In 2006, only 22 percent of adult Miamians had a bachelor’s degree. In Coral Gables, it was 58 percent.
Chain stores in particular have developed location formulas that demand lots of well-heeled, well-educated people, said Gibbs, the Michigan consultant: within a five-mile radius, 75,000 people with a bachelor’s degree or higher and annual incomes of $75,000 or more.
