The American Booksellers Association held its virtual annual meeting and community forum on May 22, drawing 103 participants. The meeting marked Allison Hill's fifth anniversary as CEO. Tegan Tigani, the outgoing ABA board president and children’s book buyer at Queen Anne Book Company in Seattle, noted that the pandemic shut down much of the country’s businesses just a month after Hill moved to the ABA, commending Hill and her team for guiding the organization through a turbulent time.
“When dystopian fiction became current events, Allison's leadership sustained us all,” Tigani said. “Allison has provided our organization with vision, structure, teamwork, and momentum that have allowed ABA to deal with current challenges and to anticipate future ones.”
Tigani noted that Hill's "focus on the ABCs—Abacus, Batch, and counting our sales—is helping us prove our impact and improve our performance. She effectively leads a committed and growing staff of all-stars,” including outgoing ABA CFO PK Sindwani. “PK's reporting has been a miracle of clarity, which, on its own, is enough to make a board eternally grateful,” Tigani added. “But he contributes to every board meeting well beyond spreadsheets and graphs."
Incoming ABA board president Cynthia Compton's 2024 financial report disclosed that the ABA’s operating revenue this past fiscal year was $7.6 million, while its expenses were $9.3 million. The organization employs 40 people, and its investment portfolio currently contains $26.5 million. “The ABA draws from that investment, that endowment, to help fund our association,” said Compton. “About 20% of our revenue comes from membership dollars every year.”
In her membership report, Jenny Cohen of Waucoma Bookstore in Hood River, Ore., noted that 323 bookstores opened in 2024, while 37 bookstores closed; of the new stores, 60 are BIPOC-owned and 21 are Black-owned. There were also 274 ABA provisional members in 2024, i.e., people on the verge of or intending to open bookstores. “For physical models so far in 2025, we have 81; that includes storefronts, mobile and popup stores,” she said.
In her CEO report, Hill noted that the ABA’s membership grew by 18% in 2024, and that the organization has doubled its membership in the last five years. Last year also marked the fourth consecutive year in which more than 200 ABA stores opened. There are currently 3,281 locations, operated by 2,863 member bookstores.
“In many ways, our 2024 annual report echoes our 2023 annual report: hundreds of new stores, the largest Winter Institute in ABA history, the largest Children's Institute in ABA history, and the most successful Independent Bookstore Day to date,” Hill said. “But as all of you know, the numbers tell only part of the story.”
Hill then listed the the challenges booksellers have faced this past year. Besides the usual issues of thin margins, rising costs, and Amazon’s “chokehold” upon the marketplace, there were, she noted, “more urgent threats that shook the very foundation of your work, as the right to read and access to books sustained coordinated attacks. Our mission, ABA's mission, to help independent bookstores survive and thrive remained at the core of everything we did, and guided by ABA's Ends policies.”
The ABA, Hill said, “delivered that mission” through its conferences and more than 100 virtual educational and networking opportunities. The organization, she added, set up book clubs, podcasts, and virtual affinity group meet-ups, in addition to maintaining its resource library for booksellers. The ABA also increased its focus on teaching financial literacy over the last year, presenting educational sessions at regional bookselling shows that emphasized increasing cash flow and offering individualized financial counseling for members.
Hill noted that the ABA doubled its American Booksellers for Free Expression team last year, and ABFE produced a handbook on the right to read in the age of book bans. It also set up a hotline for members experiencing harassment, and has lobbied against legislation restricting the freedom to read. And, Hill said, “we also work closely with publishers to create efficiencies in the industry, reduce obstacles to selling books, and advocate for better terms for independent bookstores.”
ABA Members Speak Up
The ABA's community forum—moderated by Compton, of 4 Kids Books & Toys in Zionsville, Ind., and MacArthur’s Books in Carmel, Ind.—addressed such prosaic matters relating to the business of bookselling as credit card swipe fee legislation, the impact of tariffs on sidelines and their potential impact on on books, and the prevalence of damaged shipments of books. But the discussion was bookended by dissections of the ABA’s stance on Palestine.
Reiko Redmonde of Revolution Books in Berkeley urged the ABA to endorse a public statement supporting Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and essayist and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize recipient for commentary on the situation in Gaza. Toha, she said, has been targeted by pro-Zionist groups in the U.S. and lives in fear of being deported by the Trump administration.
“We urge ABA to also sign [the statement, or to issue their own statement,” Redmonde stated, “and take a stand with this poet and courageous human being.” She also urged booksellers to organize gatherings at their stores “where poets, authors, personages, others can read the poems of Mosab. It can make a real difference for the powerful words of this poet to be heard in bookstores and gatherings across this country, and for the ABA to sponsor this effort.”
Reiterating that the ABA condemns the harassment of booksellers and the silencing of Palestinian voices, Hill emphasized the importance of amplifying Toha’s situation, promising that the ABA and its board would “stay in conversation” concerning Redmonde's proposals. Compton added that the board has, to date, received seven letters from booksellers relating to the ABA and its board taking a stance on the conflict in Palestine.
“We have members that adamantly do not want us to make a statement on one side and then another. And then we are called back to our role in being the board of directors of a trade organization,” Compton said. “As a trade organization, we have a very specific structure, and as a board of a trade organization, we basically have two jobs. One of them is fiduciary. We're supposed to provide oversight for the management of the funds of the organization, which obviously provides all the services that we all take part of. The other part is governance.”
Compton added: “As a board, we have to stay within that trade organization. Let the work talk for us. Let the work speak for us, and let us continue to enable the staff and the support and all the support that we all need.”
