The Unreality of An Airport Bookstore

Nothing better than a book and a Chili's Too

Of all the various and sundry places to buy things in an airport, bookstores are one of the most interesting. I never pass up the chance to browse through the shelves of a Hudson Books – or Barbara’s Bookstore, shout out O’Hare – if I get the chance. As someone who likes to show up to the airport 2-3 hours early, I often have time to go bum around an airport bookstore. Sometimes, I’ll even buy something. Not usually, but sometimes.

The thing about airport bookstores, no matter what brand name is attached to the walls outside the storefront in big bold letters, is that they all look the same. Bright fluorescent lighting, fake wood shelves, nonfiction bestsellers on tables right when you walk in, and fiction on the back wall. Science fiction and fantasy usually have a small shelf hidden behind a support column. Pens, snacks, and a spinning stand of Moleskine notebooks usually sit right by the cash register. There’s generally one person working at the whole store doing ten different jobs and being severely underpaid.

The other wild thing about these bookstores is that their inventory is 99% identical across airports. I’m thinking of American ones specifically, though the few times I’ve flown abroad the selection of authors isn’t that much different, just more non-English versions of things. They stock lots of Stephen King, James Patterson, JK Rowling, whatever the newest celebrity autobiography is, Sarah J. Maas, and a bunch of WWII biographies. There will be travel guides and puzzle books as well, but that’s just for show. I’ve never seen anyone grab a travel guide. It’s not 1968 anymore. People have phones.

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The selection is basically whatever is at the top of the bestseller list at the moment and a few things like The Da Vinci Code thrown in for good measure. It’s as if an algorithm made a bookstore. Every once in a while, you’ll be able to spot an employee influencing the buying, there will be a short row of comic books, or a “local author” shelf, but generally, it’ll be bestsellers and that’s it. Maybe like a stack of Penguin Classics for people who want to pretend they’re smart while drinking their eighth Miller Lite at the Chili’s Too waiting for their delayed flight to Dallas. No offense to Chili’s Too. Great spot to drink eight Miller Lites at an airport. Usually though, that much personality does not make its way into these stores.

This makes sense for a bookstore in an airport. They have to cater to the biggest audience possible. Most people passing through its shelves will pass through them only once in their lives. There’s no way to get a read on what the regulars like because there are no regulars. It makes sense to just put the most popular stuff out. Broad appeal is far more important than anything for a store like this. Generally, people stop at a Hudson’s because they are afraid of being bored on a flight and want something to read, not because they want to find their new favorite book. It’s easier to convince someone to buy whatever the newest Stephen King is versus some new indie darling they haven’t heard of.

The interesting thing about this is that this model for a bookstore only works in airports. Back in the halcyon days of 2015 – that’s like nine years ago somehow – Amazon launched some physical bookstores. Amazon, besides ruining everyone’s lives and allowing Jeff Bezos to find the seven names of the demon Asmodeus, famously first started out as an internet bookseller. They billed the switch to brick-and-mortar stores as a natural evolution of their business. However, these stores resembled airport bookstores far more than they resembled traditional retail bookstores. Instead of displaying books so that the spines were showing – the most efficient and immediately recognizable part of any bookstore – Amazon shelved all their books so that the front covers were showing. Airport bookstores don’t go as whole hog as Amazon did with this, but they do show way more front covers than your local mom-and-pop bookmonger. It’s one of those things that you know feels weird but you can’t put a finger on it until someone tells you. You won’t be able to stop recognizing it once you see it. Amazon also stocked its shelves algorithmically. That is, a bunch of middle managers told a bunch of coders to come up with some formula that supposedly told them what the most popular books would be. They would then stock their shelves only with the most popular books. How could it fail?

Well, spoiler alert, it failed. By 2022 Amazon announced that they would be closing all of their brick-and-mortar stores. Suckers.

I actually went into the Amazon bookstore in Chicago. It opened up on Southport in Lakeview, on a strip that included a Capital One Café, a Sephora, a Madewell, and a Bonobos. It was pretty well chosen as a spot. A strip of physical locations for internet-famous stores. When I entered, I immediately felt like I was an hour early to a flight and needed to kill some time. Like a physical wave of psychic energy washed over me convincing me that I was at O’Hare. Not exactly something you want to experience when you’re not in an airport.  Everything looked exactly like a Hudson’s. There were lots of books, but few titles. That is, there were like four dozen copies of whatever the newest Dean Koontz and David Baldacci novels were, but nothing in between. That’s just not what anyone wants out of a bookstore. The airport bookstore model just doesn’t work outside of an airport.

From my experience buying books online is only good if you know exactly what you want. You type the title and author’s name into the search bar and it pops up. You pick the version you want, type in your mailing address and credit card, wait a bit and it shows up at your door. But if I want to find something new? Something I haven’t heard of? Then online shopping just won’t do it. It’s hard to type in the search bar when you don’t even know what you’re looking for.

That’s what traditional bookstores – and libraries! – are so good at. They have thousands of titles, maybe just one or two copies of each, but so many options. You can flip through the pages, getting a sense of the flow of the book, of the type of prose. You can find new authors, new genres, and new stuff. That’s much harder to do online or in an airport bookstore. Even Barnes & Noble, which at one point seemed like it was going the way of the dodo, realized this. They gave their store managers and employees more say over what gets stocked and have seen a resurgence in profit.

The point of all this is to say that airports truly warp reality and no one should ever model a real-life business off of what works at a place like ORD.  

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