--- type: "article" title: "Feel Good Friday: A Tale of Two Bookstores" summary: "How Barner Books and Inquiring Minds Bookstore of New Paltz Found a Way to Thrive in the Highly Competitive Age of Amazon" newsletter: "The Coffeehouse Creative" newsletter_handle: "the-coffeehouse-creative" newsletter_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-coffeehouse-creative" author: "Michael Dea (@michaelhdea)" published: "2026-06-19T11:10:00.000Z" canonical_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-coffeehouse-creative/a/feel-good-friday-a-tale-of-two-bookstores" markdown_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-coffeehouse-creative/a/feel-good-friday-a-tale-of-two-bookstores.md" chat_url: "https://usecommune.com/n/the-coffeehouse-creative/a/feel-good-friday-a-tale-of-two-bookstores/chat" source_url: "https://coffeehousecreative.beehiiv.com/p/feelgoodfridaybarnerbooksinquiringminds" body_source: "imported" likes: 0 replies: 0 body_words: 1180 --- # Feel Good Friday: A Tale of Two Bookstores [Moda](https://moda.app/?utm_source=beehiiv&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign={{publication_alphanumeric_id}}&utm_content=exports_textonly_may14&_bhiiv=opp_5bf74b5e-0946-4bae-8e8a-c74e66bb50ad_e14f5be0&bhcl_id=40530267-a2c0-4da5-b332-c65317844f4f_{{subscriber_id}}_{{email_address_id}}) is the viral AI design agent for polished, on-brand slides, docs, ads, and more. Turn prompts into fully editable designs on a real canvas, then export to PowerPoint, PDF, and more. *[Try Moda Free Today](https://moda.app/?utm_source=beehiiv&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign={{publication_alphanumeric_id}}&utm_content=exports_textonly_may14&_bhiiv=opp_5bf74b5e-0946-4bae-8e8a-c74e66bb50ad_e14f5be0&bhcl_id=40530267-a2c0-4da5-b332-c65317844f4f_{{subscriber_id}}_{{email_address_id}})* When someone travels to the Hudson Valley, they may be thinking more about hiking than literature these days, given the scenic views one finds in the area. And yet, there’s a variety of independent bookstores that make up The Hudson Valley Book Trail, a collection of businesses dedicated to furnishing readers with the ideas and stories that entertain and provide context to their lives. It’s perhaps less surprising that New Paltz, a college town, has a couple of bookshops which have an interesting, feel good element that’s hard to miss. On the narrow lane called Church Street, you can find Barner Books and Inquiring Minds Bookstore situated less than fifty feet from one another. It makes it easy to go from one front door to the other, which one imagines would make it difficult for either bookstore to thrive when the margins are slim and it’s easy enough to find the books you need at a discount elsewhere. Yet the two stores find a way for both of them to succeed, which makes it both a feel good story and an instructive lesson in growing a symbiotic business. ## First, the Feel Good For some people, books and the stores that sell them are places of commerce first, but the best brick-and-mortar shops make it easy for book lovers to spend hours getting lost in the pages of their inventory, and that’s enough to warm any bibliophile’s heart. Barner Books is one of the oldest bookstores in the New Paltz area and offers a variety of second hand and rare volumes alongside handmade journals. With vintage typewriters and posters framed on the walls with little space to lounge, Barner Books creates an active atmosphere for book lovers to explore the available selection for rare finds that might be out of print. There are also some modern titles you can find, but if what you’re looking for isn’t on Barner’s shelves, then Inquiring Minds is right across the street. Inquiring Minds Bookstore is a shop that has two locations in upstate New York, one of which is in New Paltz and the other being in Saugerties. Like Barner Books, it does offer a selection of used volumes, but it also offers brand new books alongside them that cater to local community tastes. The owners prioritize community integration, which means that you’ll find volumes that reflect the local tastes in new books, just as the selection of used volumes reflects the interests of the community in a different way at Barner Books. Combined, a New Paltz visitor with literary leanings is able to find an independent bookstore experience that can help them feel right at home, whether they’re a visitor of a newly minted local. ## The Growth Strategy That Sustains a Pair of Bookstores Depending on who you ask, they might tell you that independent bookstores are largely a dead-end business model. Between the low margins on books, the cost of maintaining inventory within a physical space, and the competition from low-cost alternatives like Amazon, it’s hard to justify investing in a business that isn’t likely to see much growth. Yet, despite the dominance of Amazon, the consolidation of the publishing industry, and the vast swings in demand for physical books over the past decade, independent bookstores aren’t disappearing, and both Barner Books and Inquiring Minds offer some insight into why. Both are fully integrated into their communities and promote themselves as part of the Hudson Valley Book Trail, but perhaps the biggest reason why they succeed is they don’t see themselves as the competition that business experts may think they are. ### How Working Together Can Grow a Business Traditionally, bookstores competed on the basis of access to volumes. The more titles a business could shelve, the more successful they would ultimately be, because their marketability to the community was directly related to how reliably they could service their client, which is part of why Barnes and Noble became a dominant player in the industry in the mid to late 20th century. However, ecommerce stores like Amazon made it hard to rely solely on physical access as a driver of growth, because anyone could get books online for a fraction of the cost physical stores offered them for. Under this paradigm, both Barner and Inquiring Minds should have failed, but instead shifted the focus of their competitive advantage. Rather than relying on access, both specialized their space around community interest and specific facets of their trade. Barner Books thrives by offering books that are hard to find or used while Inquiring Minds curates a selection of used and new books that prioritize hyper-local interest. Both do offer some combination of new and used, but the focus is complementary rather than competitive with one another, making it possible for them to turn a profit without trying to take out-discount Amazon or each other. ## The Bottom Line There are many reasons why a business might choose not to compete with another organization. It may be that the organization is bigger, that the niche is different, or that they’re seeking to deposition themselves against a less popular incumbent, but it’s rare to see a business that may be an actual competitor work collaboratively with their competition rather than seek to dominate. Barner Books and Inquiring Minds Bookstore are an example of what could be possible if businesses focused less on domination and more on delivering value to their communities. Everyone in New Paltz can order their books from Amazon if they really wanted to, but both bookshops provide a unique experience for their customers which helps justify their consistent financial support. In fact, the rulebook that both have followed for the decades of their existence is so successful that even Barnes and Noble has adopted the strategy of curating books over trying to compete with Amazon, taking itself out of the competitive race to scale and enabling it to grow for the first time in decades. However, even if you’re not a business student or budding entrepreneur, it’s still worth checking out the pair of bookshops on Church street if you find yourself in New Paltz, NY. You might just walk away with a new read you didn’t know you needed. ##### Before You Go… This is part of a series of articles highlighting businesses operating in the food and beverage space as part of an initiative to share feel good stories coming from local businesses. There's a few things you can do to support this initiative: - If you're interested in being notified when a new article's released, make sure to follow me on LinkedIn or subscribe to *The Coffeehouse Creative*. - If you're a business or customer that's got a feel-good story or a recommendation, shoot me a message and it may be featured as part of Feel Good Fridays. *** [Powered by beehiiv](https://www.beehiiv.com/?utm_campaign=bfbe4adc-a456-4409-a8ad-840f32a4f6ed&utm_medium=post_rss&utm_source=the_coffeehouse_creative) *** ## Discussion No replies yet.