While Amazon slashed book prices for Prime Day 2025, Nina Barrett stood firm to protect what she called the “oasis of the community” — Bookends & Beginnings.
“The role of a bookstore in a college town is to be a smart place that isn’t exclusive,” Barrett said.
Barrett opened Bookends & Beginnings in 2014, bringing to life a vision she had for 30 years. Located in downtown Evanston, the bookstore hosts author meet-ups and sponsors Waldo scavenger hunts — an annual event that encourages children to support local businesses. It further opens its doors to academic conversations and community gatherings.
Over half of U.S. independent bookstores have closed since Amazon’s entry into the book market in 1995, according to Investopedia. Barrett said Amazon “transformed” people’s shopping habits.
“We pay more to buy books from the publisher than Amazon does,” Barrett said. “That’s why Amazon can offer the prices they do. People say a bookstore is so expensive, so we have to make an argument about the value of paying more.”
From the colorful literary posters on the walls and independently designed merchandise to the shelves decorated with handwritten book recommendation notes, everything in Bookends & Beginnings speaks to its purpose of humanizing the reading experience.
Barrett said the bookstore offers a variety of books — more scholarly than a chain store, yet more commercial than an antiquarian one.
“Anybody can come in and find a book that will educate them, inspire them, entertain them [or] distract them,” she said.
Every month, Susan Besson, a 66-year-old Evanston resident, buys books at the store. She said Barrett has fought for the “health, strength and survival” of independent bookstores.
“Amazon is hugely convenient but lacks that human touch and the way that book selection is curated,” she said.
While people can read online book reviews, Besson said it’s never the same as talking to another person about it in a bookstore.
“I won’t even go into some of the feelings that I have about what Amazon has done to communities,” she said. “Sometimes I just stop in here because I want to be in this place. I always learn something, and I always discover something.
Jen Allen, an independent sales representative at Bookends & Beginnings, said the store offers an extensive collection of writing books and, to her amazement, cookbooks.
“Nina absolutely loves cookbooks,” Allen said. “She orders them and understands them in a very different way. This just feels like Bookends & Beginnings. It’s the employees’ personalities and things they love.”
Allen added that when employees sell these books, they draw on their knowledge to offer even more ideas.
“That’s the difference between an independent bookstore and a chain store or Amazon,” she said. “It is curated so that their mission is the neighborhood.”
During the COVID lockdown, Bookends & Beginnings held a fundraising campaign to pay bills. Barrett said she received notes from donors, including one woman from Texas who wrote that the comfort of the bookstore got her son through a “miserable” freshman year.
“People are underestimating the power that bookstores have to save our minds,” Barrett said.
She said she believes bookstores are the “health club” of the mind for future generations in a world overwhelmed by social media.
Barrett said Bookends & Beginnings still believes in a book-length piece of research, writing or fantasy that takes readers into a different space where they are not being distracted all the time.
“We are a place of education in your community that’s open to everyone, where your kid does the Waldo contest, where you can meet authors like Lev Grossman, and those are all things that buying a book cheap at Amazon is not going to get you,” she said.
