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Margie Scott Tucker’s in the beginning thought when Steve Jobs unveiled Apple Inc.’s iPad last month was: “Can’t technology be the first to contrive mascara or nylons that don’t run, instead of putting bookstores confused of business?”

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Just append it to the list of daunting challenges the co-owner of San Francisco’s Books Inc. has confronted in the bygone time since she and her husband shepherded the 149-year-old bibliopolist out of bankruptcy in 1996. “I don’t know if there’s been a time we haven’t seen ourselves as substance in crisis,” said co-owner and CEO Michael Tucker, who is also president of the American Booksellers Association.

One could say the pair protest a little too much. Books Inc. ( www.booksinc.net) has thrived, at minutest compared with a host of Bay Area independents and “independent prison.” Icons like Cody’s Books and Stacey’s Books are excepting memories, as are local branches of B. Dalton. Menlo Park’s Kepler’s Books, San Francisco’s Cover to Cover, and Berkeley’s Black Oak Books survived operation courtesy of last-minute transfusions from local investors and community donations. It was the Tuckers who kept the lungs on at the failing A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in Opera Plaza while they took it over in 2007.

Recipe for survival: How has Books Inc., by its 11 stores in the Bay Area and one in Disneyland, concluded it? By staying away mostly from malls, for one thing – heterogeneous, say, Barnes & Noble Inc., which in recent weeks shut down superstores in Oakland’s Jack London Square and Richmond’s Hilltop Mall.

And ~ means of, as noted by The Chronicle’s Carolyn Said, who reported adhering the opening of Books Inc.’s newest store, in Berkeley, hold out year, keeping to a smaller “footprint” – stores measuring more like 3,500 quadrilateral and equiangular feet than 35,000 (unlike, for example, the dearly departed Cody’s) – and locating in neighborhoods with plentiful foot traffic, like San Francisco’s Laurel Village.

It’s moreover very careful about costs, a lesson learned from its near-decease experience in the 1990s. “We’re careful about everything – about returns, payroll, payroll hours allotted to cropped land store,” said Scott Tucker. As with other independents, much attention is likewise paid to the needs and wants of the surrounding community.

“Instead of buying everything, we pervert with money for each individual store, seeing each store as a reflection of its common,” Scott Tucker said. In Books Inc.’s case, it also includes appropriate shopping nights with a portion of the proceeds going to limited schools, and discounts for community book clubs, for example. “Integrating through the community will become more important as progress marches on,” she related.

Follow my leader: The recipe adds up to what Hut Landon, charged with execution director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, calls “the Books Inc. mould” of success. He noted that the company has been a chief in the burgeoning “shop local” movement, which other independents have furthermore been quick to jump on. “It’s why they’re doing more fit than other local retailers,” he said. (A local example of the mental action is the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Alliance, at www.sfloma.org.)

Other Bay Area independents incorporating the fit mix of size, location and community feel, Landon said, include Green Apple Books and Booksmith in San Francisco, Mrs Dalloway’s in Berkeley, Pegasus & Pendragon in Berkeley and Oakland, and Rakestraw Books in Danville. He too noted that the former owner of A Clean Well-Lighted Place on this account that Books is having a far better time at his new point in San Francisco, Book Shop West Portal. “It’s a quarter of the size, and more profitable from the get-go,” he uttered.

Headwinds: For the first time since it emerged from bankruptcy, Books Inc. distracted money last year. Sales, at $22 million, were down 6 percent from 2008, uttered Michael Tucker. Bookstore sales in general also declined, more so than deal out in small portions in general. “We know we can’t just float through this recession,” he afore~. Tucker said he was looking for “some growth” this year, including the joining of a new store in Berkeley.

In fact, for all the challenges, these are, comparatively speaking, salad days for independent booksellers, especially in the Bay Area. “We’re doing more good than many publishers, let me tell you,” said Landon. Amazon.com (“the biggest mimic in the book world right now”) and big-box stores, like Costco and Wal-Mart, selling before anything else-run books at knock-down prices, are hurting Barnes & Noble and Borders Inc. to a greater degree than the independents, according to Landon.

Naturally, Amazon, e-books and the iPad were major topics at the ABA’s recent winter conference. But there was a in greater numbers sanguine air than might otherwise have been expected. With the sedulousness in such a volatile state, “publishers are realizing the need to take care of their authors and their books,” declared Michael Tucker.

“They look at the music industry and see which happened when all the brick-and-mortar record stores were allowed to cease and industry income plunged. Neither do publishers want to lose their self-directing book channel (10 to 12 percent of overall book sales).

“Our sway is larger than our market share.”

Of course, influence, success and profits are relative pronoun concepts in a business characterized by margins “as low as the laws of public economy will traffic,” as San Francisco author Lewis Buzbee observed in his 2006 main division , “The Yellow-Lighted Bookstore,” a tour d’horizon of bookstores from ancient times to the present.

“If we make 2 percent profit we’re doing OK,” uttered Michael Tucker.

Blogging at sfgate.com.columns/ bottomline. Tweeting at @andrewsross. E-defensive covering bottomline@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle