BELLEVILLE — Rob Eckman and Steve Mathews were strolling down Main Street here when they noticed an old bank building. With 25-foot granite pillars and a tiled entryway, the couple joked that it would make a good space for an independent bookstore — especially in a town without one already.

The couple went in and introduced themselves. The building owners, Andrew and Kathy Bridgeman, no longer lived in Illinois and had considered selling the building. If Eckman and Mathews wanted to sell books, the Bridgemans said, they could have first dibs to buy the 1912 building at 20 East Main Street.

“It was lightning in a bottle,” said Mathews. “It really has been a kismet of sorts.”

Eckman and Mathews, married for eight years, had been looking to move to Illinois to be closer to their son and grandchildren. So they decided to sell their Utah home, buy the bank building and open their bookstore, said Eckman, who had been a manager at a King’s English Bookshop in Salt Lake City.

“We’re both too young to retire. We did want to move. It was time to make a change in our lives,” Eckman said. “This was really the cherry on the cake.”

Opening Belleville Books last fall was no small effort. Before moving, the couple bought 12,000 used books in Utah, which they drove in a truck across the country. Then Mathews, whose background is in interior design and construction, spent months patching holes, painting and removing the bank lobby’s drop ceiling to expose a high, ornate plaster one.

“It was really exciting because it was discovering this hidden gem,” Mathews said. “It was almost like we were archeologists in a way.”

And last summer, nearly 40 local volunteers, from high school honor society students to grandmothers, joined in to clean and sort inventory after seeing announcements about the incoming bookstore on Facebook.

Now, full of both new and used books, Belleville Books has stayed busy by hosting book signings, book clubs, poetry open mics, weekly story times and other events since opening in September.

Shoppers are encouraged to explore the old bank vault, which houses the store’s history section, and a small antechamber, which has been converted to the romance book room, complete with a letter-writing station.

In October, Belleville Books hosted former building owner Andrew Bridgeman for the launch of his debut novel, “Fortunate Son.”

Belleville Books is part of a growing independent bookstore trend. Despite the appearance of Amazon in the ‘90s and existence of big-box bookstores, independent retailers continue to see success, especially as researchers reported an increase in reading during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The American Booksellers Association found that about 300 independent bookstores opened nationwide in 2023. And this month, trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly reported that 2024 book sales increased over 6% from 2023, to almost $14.2 billion.

Granite City has an independent bookstore, Novel Idea Bookstore And More. There’s an independent shop in Edwardsville, Afterwards Books, but the nearest one south of Belleville is 80 miles away in Carbondale.

“Southern Illinois has been called a book desert because there are no other bookstores,” Eckman. “Knowing what we know about people’s love for bookstores and opening one where there isn’t one, and doing it on a main street in a city full of people that love their main street — we had a really good feeling.”

And as consumers’ appetite for books grows, local bookstores are looking for new ways to serve their clients — including those who can’t visit in person.

Belleville Books is offering e-media options, a growing medium among book lovers. The retailer offers audiobook titles through Seattle-based app Libro.fm and e-books through New York-based website Bookshop.org.

Bookshop.org’s e-book platform launched in January. Shoppers can browse and buy e-books on the Bookshop.org website and then select an independent bookstore to receive the proceeds of the purchase.

James Crossley, co-owner of Leviathan Bookstore, at 3211 South Grand Boulevard in Tower Grove South, said Bookshop.com offers customers a local alternative to purchasing e-books from Amazon’s Kindle or Apple Books.

“There’s a substantial slice of the reading pie that wants to do their reading through a device,” Crossley said. “A significant portion want to buy and read that way without supporting massive conglomerates.”

Eckman calls Bookshop.com’s new ability to sell e-books “fantastic,” especially because many small business bookstores lack the infrastructure to offer e-media.

“It is very easy for us to simply earn some extra revenue in a business where margins are generally very slim,” he said. “With a tool like Bookshop.org, that gives us some leverage online so that we can play ball in all of these different formats of books.”

And he’s not worried that e-books will run bookshops out of business. Booksellers have learned that the consumers who are reading e-books continue to buy and read physical books, he said.

“I believe that young people are experiencing a desire to touch the media instead of seeing it on their devices,” Eckman said.

On a recent April afternoon, Katie Haugland, 24, of Alton, and Lauren Dedert, 24, of Edwardsville, were flipping through a book on Greek history in Belleville Book’s walk-in money vault. Dedert said she wanted to visit the store because there are so few independent shops on the Illinois side of the river.

A bookworm in childhood, Haugland said she started to read more again after the pandemic confined everyone to their homes and forced her college classes to go virtual.

“I felt like I really missed the paper of actual books and (I didn’t) want the strain of your eyes on a screen,” she said. “You’re able to do so much more with the physical copy of a book.”