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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
The Miami Herald reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s tough,\u201d 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, \u201cwe\u2019ve had to switch to Spanish to survive. It just reflects finances and the population.\u201d<\/p>\n Her store\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Other Spanish-language bookstores in the city also look beyond a local clientele to Web sales. Customers for Libreria Universal\u2019s broad stock of Cuba-related books are all over the country, said owner Juan Manuel Salvat.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s degree. In Coral Gables, it was 58 percent.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s degree or higher and annual incomes of $75,000 or more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading