For nearly 30 years Oren Teicher has been a strong advocate for independent booksellers, rising through the ranks of the American Booksellers Association and leading the organization as CEO since 2009. While Teicher has often preferred to have booksellers take the limelight, he has been an important force in helping to drive the resurgence of independent bookselling nationwide.

Earlier this year, Teicher announced his intention to retire from the ABA at the end of 2019. While he fully intends to continue to aggressively guide the association until then, Teicher sat down with PW just before BookExpo to discuss his three decades of working with indie booksellers and what he sees on the horizon.

Teicher, who started his career as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill, began working with the ABA in 1990. He was associate executive director/director of government affairs and then chief operating officer before succeeding Avin Mark Domnitz as CEO 10 years ago.

Across his entire career, Teicher says that only one thing has remained constant. “The people who own and operate and work in these stores are passionate about books,” says Teicher. “That was true then, and that’s true today.

“But if I think about the past 30 years,” he adds, “there is almost nothing about what we do today that’s what we did [then].”

From board meetings in the 1990s where booksellers rejected using fax machines to a world in which digital preorders through indie websites are a nationwide focus for booksellers, Teicher has seen monumental changes to the bookselling landscape and found innovative ways to help booksellers adapt.

Under Teicher, Winter Institute has grown into a major educational forum for booksellers. The ABA has also spearheaded successful political advocacy initiatives on tax fairness. And the organization has forged ties with publishers that could not have been foreseen in the 1990s, when the ABA filed lawsuits against publishers for unfair business practices.

“The environment back in the ’90s was rather litigious because the abuses were pretty egregious. The facts back then were that indie bookstores were getting the short end of the stick on lots and lots of things in the basic ways they were doing business with publishers,” says Teicher.

After the lawsuits, Teicher saw a way to improve relationships with publishers, who he calls “our publisher partners” today. “ABA made a conscious decision post-litigation that if we came together we could grow our respective businesses together, and I think that’s what’s happened,” says Teicher.

Throughout, Teicher has remained doggedly focused on ways that bookstores can increase each individual percentage point of profitability while cutting expenses. He has championed the universal invoicing system called BATCH, improved financial reporting tools for booksellers, and enhanced ABA’s educational offerings.

More than any single issue facing booksellers, Teicher says that the cost of goods continues to be the most important single challenge.

“The current terms that booksellers generally buy from publishers has to change,” says Teicher. “We cannot survive indefinitely unless we can continue to reduce the cost of goods. We can be smart renegotiating our leases, managing the hours of our staff, cutting every point with our credit card providers—we can do all that stuff, and we are—but at the end of the day the cost of goods is over half of all costs [incurred for books], and if you don’t impact the cost of goods, I think it becomes a challenged model. The fundamental basic business relationship has to change.”

More than ever, he says that change is possible because he believes industry partners and retail customers understand more and more the value of localism. Teicher has been a key driver in building and spreading the idea of the importance of local businesses to communities and the need for the public to support all local stores, not only indie bookstores. The thought of the power of local makes him hopeful as he looks ahead.

“There were some pretty dark days and a lot of concern over our long-term viability, but I don’t have that concern anymore. I would say unequivocally, whoever is sitting in this room having a conversation with you 10 years from now, there is going to be a viable indie bookstore network.”