Business

New shelf life: Indie bookstores carve new niche$

(
)

Here’s a startling plot twist for readers: local bookstores are making a comeback.

After two decades of beatings from big-box retailers and Amazon, independent booksellers are swinging to nationwide growth with clever high-tech strategies, tightly focused niches — and, in at least one case, alcohol sales.

Singularity & Co., a storefront opened in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood this August, is swiftly becoming a destination for sci-fi geeks with its project to “rescue” vintage, out-of-print pulp titles by publishing them online for monthly subscribers.

Their latest e-book: “Mr. Stranger’s Sealed Packet,” is a novel about a trip to Mars written in the 1890s, of which “only seven or eight copies” are known to exist, according to Singularity founder Ash Kalb.

“In six months, our circulation will be at least as large as the most established sci-fi publishers,” Kalb says.

Budding book merchants are showing similar creativity elsewhere, staging music concerts, selling digital content and mastering social networking in towns like Athens, Ga.; St. Paul, Minn.; and Prescott, Ariz., says Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association.

This year, newly opened mom-and-pop stores nationwide have helped fuel a double-digit sales increase after years of declines, the trade group says.

By comparison, bookstores overall have seen sales drop 1.7 percent to $11.6 billion during the past year, according to the Commerce Department.

Last week, Barnes & Noble said quarterly revenue dropped 0.4 percent, including sales of its Nook e-reader, capping a sluggish year.

Brooklyn has been a hotbed for the indie bookselling boom, with young entrepreneurs hawking hard-to-get titles and unusual services.

Heather O’Donnell, a brainy bookworm who left a teaching post at Princeton to sell rare books, tapped a deep-pocketed investor this spring to launch Honey & Wax Booksellers in Park Slope.

While prices start at less than $100, recent inventory includes a first edition of J.D. Salinger’s classic “Catcher in the Rye” ($23,000), as well as George Gershwin’s personal copy of the Jazz Age classic “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” ($4,800).

“If you’re a student and you have to read ‘Heart of Darkness,’ you might prefer to download it onto your Kindle,” O’Donnell says. “But if you end up loving it and it’s a milestone in your life, you might want a nice copy.”

If the books aren’t selling, then try booze, says 28-year-old Matthew Winn.

Having opened Molasses Books in Bushwick in July, Winn is now brewing coffee, with plans to add beer and wine to the menu next month.

Still, Winn says customers are plentiful and his tiny shop is already “making enough to pay the rent.” He isn’t sweating the fact that another bookstore, Human Relations, recently opened just eight blocks down the street.

“I send customers to them if I don’t have something, and they send people to me,” Winn said. “We hang out together. It’s nice.”

jcovert@nypost.com