Tip - As indie bookstores hang in, owning one becomes the new fantasy career - The Boston Globe

When Porter Square Books sold in August, it was the fourth prominent Boston-area independent bookstore to change hands in the past five years. The fourth brokered by the same Needham mergers-and-acquisitions guy. The fourth bought by a middle-age-ish wealthy person or couple with no experience in bookstores, save for a love of them. And only one cat owner among them. If you ask these new booksellers what they know about the business that they didn’t before they switched sides of the cash register, almost to a person they let out a laugh that’s less an expression of mirth than a question: “How much time do you have?” It’s a laugh that hints at the complexities of inventory control and payroll processing, and at the perverse fact that bookstore owners have little time to read the books that lured them into the business in the first place.
Tags: Harvad Book Store,Porter Square Books,New England Mobile Book Fair,Wellesley Books,Diary of a Wimpy Kid