How Viennese bookstores survive, even thrive in a digital age

by Alexandria Turner

VIENNA, Austria – Five bookstores have closed on Vienna’s Graben Street in the past 10 years. In a digital age, here as in most places, the printed, published word faces challenges.

It is revealing that in Austria, the government has stepped in to prop up book and newspaper publishing with subsidy-producing law.

For example, Austrian book publishers receive government funding if they publish books approved by a jury, with Austrian authors and topics receiving the highest priority. Essays, children’s books and fiction are also sponsored, along with non-fiction books about art, culture, philosophy and history.

A government-funded promotion scheme to help book publishers started in 1992 with a law titled Verlagsförderung (or “publishers’ promotion”), according to Dr. Murray Hall, German literature professor at the University of Vienna.

A second pro-print law, Presseförderungsgesetz (or “press promotion law”), passed in 2004 to give government assistance to daily and weekly newspapers, as well. The periodicals receive financial help to train new journalists, pay for international reporting, and to provide newspapers to schools at no charge to the schools.

Through the newspaper promotion scheme, Austria’s federal chancellery provides newspapers with a certain amount of money every year, Hall said.

“It doesn’t mean everybody gets the same amount, but it can make the difference about whether they go under today or in 50 years,” he said.

Tough times

While many bookstores have re-located from the city’s more popular districts in the center to peripheral districts, where rent is cheaper, books are not at risk of disappearing. Assuring that publishers have the incentives and means to publish books means the booksellers have books to sell.

However, changing interests among the reading public have made keeping a bookstore in business more difficult.

“I wouldn’t say to anybody that he should open an antiquarian bookstore,” said Hanz Lugmair, owner of Antiquariat Informatio Lugmair bookshop. “I love to do it, and it was easy before, but it’s not so easy now.”

Located in the Fourth District, Lugmair’s bookshop has been open since 1978. More recently, he has been selling from his 50,000-volume collection online, along with maps, music sheets and concert programs.

He said he was a book collector before he decided to open the shop.

Lugmair is representative of a growing category of booksellers that comprises those who don’t have to rely on book-selling as their only source of income. For him, his pension helps, and it allows him to take some time off.

“In my career, I’ve sold more books personally at the store,” Lugmair said. “But now I am already on a pension, and I don’t open all or every day.”

The personal touch

The more contemporary bookstores also rely on loyal customers with whom they have developed relationships.

At Shakespeare & Company, and English-language bookstore in the First District, stresses the personal touch.

“We offer coffees to our regulars,” said Sheila Perlaki, a 10-year employee at the store. “We chit chat. Sometimes people bump into each other here, or meet up here.”

As one of the few English-only bookstores in the city, Shakespeare & Company is known among the locals, but it also claims international customers who come in when they are visiting Vienna, Perlaki said. For this customer base, the store imports English edition books from the United States and Great Britain, and it routinely orders books for customers having difficulty finding what they need elsewhere.

Despite the uniqueness of its English-only selection, Shakespeare & Company agrees that bookselling has become a tough industry.

“Everybody who is a bookseller knows that it’s sort of not the rich-making trade,” Perlaki said. “You have to have a passion for books and literature.”

This passion is what keeps the doors of many bookshops open, even though the shop owner may not rely principally on the money made from selling books.

“I do this job because I want to do it, said Brigitte Salanda, owner of a.punkt, a German-language bookshop also in the First District. “I’m 70 years old; I can stay at home. But I like my customers, and I like the shop. And I like the books.”

Salanda, who opened her first bookstore in 1968, has sold mostly books on politics and psychology since opening a.punkt in 2000, she said. Twice a year, Salanda releases a booklet of book recommendations based on what she has read and sold in the store.

In the same district is Franz Leo & Company, an independent bookstore that has been around for roughly 200 years, though it has changed owners many times. Co-owned by Susanne and Ulla Remmer, whose grandparents bought the store before the Second World War before passing it on to their son, Susanne and Ulla’s father.

“[My father] was always very keen on the shop, and he loved bookselling,” Ulla Remmer said. “He was really a bookseller all his life, with his lifeblood. And he somehow transferred this to us, this love of book reading, of literature.”

The store concentrates on fiction, history and children’s books, but the Remmers also have smaller sections for railway books, English tourist books, antique books, cookbooks and garden books.

The sisters say they are good friends with Shakespeare & Company’s ownership; it’s not uncommon for the two shops to refer customers one to another.

Though online marketplaces like Amazon have made the bookselling business a challenging, even cut-throat one, Vienna’s shops find ways to offer things the Internet cannot, such book presentations and, of course, the personal touch.

“I once had this customer, and he said, ‘So how would you convince me to buy in the shop instead of online?’” Perlaki said. “And I said, ‘Well, Amazon doesn’t smile as nice as I do,’ which obviously convinced him.”