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To survive threats, St. Louis's independent bookstores band together

In Missouri, like everywhere else, hundreds of under-the-radar bookstores struggle to stay above water in an age of Amazon and E-readers. Earlier this year a group of independent bookstores in St. Louis forgot about looking at each other as competitors and banded together. Their goal is to promote each other while keeping an eye on threats to the bookstore industry.

The Independent Bookstore Alliance, as it's called, uses events like signings, bookstore tours and literary speed dating to reach out to the community. As part of the Word Missouri series, which examines Missouri’s literary culture, KBIA’s Davis Dunavin joined one of these bookstore tours. Here’s his story.

Davis Dunavin grew up in the bootheel of Missouri and worked for the Southeast Missourian and Off! Magazine before moving to New York City in 2006, where he worked as a freelance writer and a bookstore clerk. He's a Masters student in Journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and served as a Convergence Journalism teaching assistant at KBIA before launching the Word Missouri project in August. He lives in Columbia with his wife Elizabeth, coincidentally also a bookstore clerk and organizer of the Cold Reading poetry series at Get Lost Bookshop in downtown Columbia. When he's not there, he can sometimes be found leading a double life as a street musician.