But she is aspiring to join a small band of bookstore owners who have found patches of old-fashioned success in recent years, competing where Amazon cannot: by being small and sleek, with personal service, intimate author events and a carefully chosen rotation of books.

In Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Greenlight Bookstore opened in 2009 and reported sales of more than $1 million in its first year. The Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee was founded two years ago and has been profitable both years, its owner said.

But there are plenty of headlines chronicling the woes of struggling independents. In Manhattan, St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village has been teetering for months, saved by a last-minute rent discount from the landlord. The owner of RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, N.H., said this month that he needed to raise more than $100,000 to save it. More than 150 concerned people packed the store last week to discuss its fate. Ithaca, N.Y., residents helped keep the treasured Buffalo Street Books in business by raising more than $250,000 and reopening the store as a co-op.

A similar outrage swept across Nashville late last year when the owners of Davis-Kidd Booksellers, founded in 1980, said that they intended to close the city’s last independent bookstore that did not primarily sell used, specialty or religious books. (Barnes & Noble has two stores in the suburbs, and recently opened a college bookstore on the edge of the Vanderbilt campus.)

“It was a civic tragedy,” said Adam Ross, a Nashville writer whose novel, “Mr. Peanut,” was published last year. “The Nashville literary community went into a sort of Code Red situation.”