Christmas traffic is not as heavy as it usually is at the Bermuda Bookstore, but those customers who do come in are serious about their buying.

“They have done their research online,” co-owner Hannah Willmott said. “They say, I want this, this and this. Anticipating what they will want and having it ready for them is a bit of a game.”

Business has been good at the Queen Street store for most of the year.

“The summer was particularly good,” Ms Willmott said. “We saw a lot of tourists buying books, which was nice. Sales dropped off in October, but are now steady again.”

She thought business was doing well because of the quality of books on sale.

“There have been so many good books released this year,” she said.

Top sellers this season include Rob Sheffield’s biography of singer Taylor Swift, Heartbreak is the National Anthem, former German chancellor Angela Merkel’s Freedom: Memoirs 1954–2021 and John Grisham’s collection Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions.

“Translated Asian books are also popular,” Ms Willmott said, “particularly from Korea.”

BookTok, a subgenre of social media site TikTok, has been credited with driving up book sales worldwide. Sites such as @aymansbooks with more than 825,000 followers, make book recommendations, discuss literary gossip, and give readers a sense of community.

BookTok is also credited with a new subcategory of books called ‘romantasy’, where dragons, fairies and unicorns take a back seat to spicy romance. Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing are top books in this arena.

“We don’t know where to put these books, romance or fantasy,” Bermuda Bookstore co-owner Miriam Kaye jokingly complained.

“They are all about the smut,” Ms Willmott said wryly.

Author Ms Maas, who sold almost five million print copies from her three-book series this year, pointed to BookTok as the reason for her high sales.

Thanks to social media, Ms Willmott is also seeing lesser-known writers getting more traction.

“We see customers coming in wanting a much wider range of books,” she said. “It is not all Lee Child and David Baldacci [bestselling thriller novelists] any more. That would not have happened ten years ago.”

In the early 2000s, the rise of Amazon.com and Kindle put many independent bookstores, worldwide, out of business. The Bermuda Bookstore weathered the storm.

Now, the tables have turned. According to the website Statistica, print remains the most popular book format, with 65 per cent of adults having read a physical book in the last year.

E-books are expected to reach up to 1.2 billion readers in 2027, but printed books are predicted to outdo them 1.87 billion readers.

After years of closing stores, American bookstore giants such as Barnes & Noble opened 60 new stores this year.

Young people are part of the rise in popularity of physical books. A 2021 survey revealed that 68 per cent of readers ages 18 to 29 prefer print books.

One local teenager told The Royal Gazette she preferred having physical books because devices such as phones and iPads were banned at school during the day.