It’s been a bittersweet week for the women behind the Flying Dragon Bookshop in Toronto’s Leaside neighbourhood.

On Saturday, their store was named Specialty Bookseller of the Year by the Canadian Booksellers Association. On Thursday, they announced plans to shut down at the end of June.

“We felt completely turned upside down,” Nina McCreath said of the decision she and business partner Cathy Francis made to close. “We thought that we would be here well into our retirement.”

The friends opened the shop on Bayview Ave., just south of Eglinton Ave., 8 years ago. It quickly became a neighbourhood favourite, with its weekly story-telling hours and visits from children's’ authors like Roch Carrier. They expanded into adult books and transformed the basement into a cosy salon, where young and old literati took in readings under vine-covered rafters.

Customers loved the whimsical atmosphere of the store, designed to evoke the world of fairy tales, with rich purples and gold and an evergreen tree growing into the ceiling. But McCreath said sales took a sharp turn in January. After considering options like bringing in e-books and e-readers, they decided to close instead.

“At the end of the day, we decided that what we really love to do was have our physical space and sell our books into the hands of customers,” McCreath said.

News of the closure came on the same day that Amazon.com announced that it’s now selling more Kindle books than hardcover and paperback combined. Independent bookstores in Canada are moving with the shift, said Jodi White of the Canadian Booksellers Association, which made embracing new technology a focus of its conference this past weekend.

White said the industry is coming up with solutions, like selling gift cards with download codes alongside traditional books. The Flying Dragon’s closure, while a surprise and disappointment, isn’t a bellwether for the industry, she said.

Owners of other independent bookstores, from Mabel’s Fables to Type Books, expressed their dismay over the closure Thursday. At Ella Minnow, a children’s bookstore in the Beaches, owner Heather Kuipers said it’s a tough time for all booksellers, who will have to find a way to participate in the electronic age.

“If that’s not the business you got into, I can see not wanting to invest in that,” she said. “(McCreath and Francis) are very talented at what they do. If they have decided not to continue, they’ve got good reasons.”

On Thursday, after announcing the closure through a characteristically dramatic window display, customers trickled in to share well wishes and buy up stock. McCreath, helping Ben Hoffman, 5, find the perfect book, crouched down to the second-lowest shelf and pulled out The Big Fat Cow that Goes Kapow.

“We’ll miss you,” Ben’s father, David, told McCreath, after purchasing her recommendation.

“We’ll miss you, too,” she said.