Amazon is getting out of the meat space bookstore business. Here is your chance to get into it.

Born 15 months ago at the start of the first winter of the pandemic, 15th Ave E bibliotherapeutic bookshop Oh Hello Again is searching for a new owner:

This neighborhood bookstore has received a great deal of local, national, and global hype and needs a new owner! Located near Kaiser Permanente on Capitol Hill, the shop receives a ton of foot traffic. We have loyal neighborhood customers and the option to take over an online store selling books and monthly subscription boxes. All store fixtures, technology (point of sale system, speaker, etc.), shipping materials, and inventory is included with the sale.

The Craigslist post for the store went up this week. The asking price is $45,000 plus taking over the store’s around $1,700 a month lease. “Come be an integral part of the community and live the dream by owning your own indie bookstore!,” it reads.

CHS reported here on Oh Hello Again’s late 2020 debut as owner Kari Ferguson introduced the idea of retail bibliotherapy to Seattle with a shop organized by topics — “mental health, everyday problems, bettering yourself, relationships, travel, and many more.”

“You can find the topic you’re interested in. Or a book maybe you weren’t even looking for,” Ferguson said at the time.

A year and three months later, Ferguson is hoping to hand the store over to a new owner.  Ferguson said the search became necessary due to her plans to begin a PhD program abroad. Instead of shutting the store down when the lease runs out later this year, her hope is to find someone to “either continue the dream or remake the shop into something they are passionate about.”

The hopes for a new owner comes as global retail giant Amazon will slash its brick and mortar ambitions, shuttering its bookstores, 4-star and Pop Up retail outlets across Seattle and across the country as the company’s physical store sales “plateaued in the range of $4 billion for the past several years.”

Oh Hello Again’s retail reportedly trails Amazon ever so slightly — ownership reports gross annual revenue of around $80,000.

Learn more at ohhelloagain.com.

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