Sue Zumberge, manager of Common Good Books in St. Paul, is the rare bookstore person who majored in history rather than English.

That perspective helps as she leads the independent shop through sweeping changes in publishing, from the rise of digital books and eReaders to the demise of big box stores and the swelling tide of self-published titles.

"My favorite era is the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution," Zumberge said. "I thought how exciting it would be to live in an era when things were changing so dramatically and rapidly. But that's what we're living in now. If you stand there and say, 'I'm not going to change,' you're going to be run over."

So Common Good Books will continue to evolve, Zumberge said, as it has since it opened in 2006 under owner Garrison Keillor. (Yes, that Garrison Keillor, who suggests titles, shops in the store and occasionally unpacks boxes and signs his own works there.)

In keeping with the digital trend, the shop sells Google eBooks on its website, said Zumberge, who has been in the business since she opened a bookstore in the 1970s in Montana.

Common Good Books now has more mainstream best-sellers — Dan Brown is no longer off limits — with many chain stores closing. It also has more collectible books, from The Library of America and Everyman's Library, with greater shelf and gift appeal, Zumberge said, than digital rivals.

The shop carries one of her favorite formats, audio books on CDs, and takes selected self-published books on consignment.

I love to tell people that our fourth largest-selling section is poetry. That is probably attributable to our owner because he's such a booster of poetry. But it also indicates the number of people who read and love poetry in this city. Fiction is our best seller. Behind that is biography, and then our history section, then poetry, then non-fiction.

You have aesthetic people who want to hold that book, who love the feeling of opening a book, cracking its binding for the first time. Marking it up, turning a page down, writing in the margins. If you're not tuned into that, it would be very hard to make that argument. (The good thing is people are into that).

It's primarily neighborhood. We have lots of apartments and colleges. We're a destination store. We carry ("Prairie Home Companion") T-shirts and mugs but it's not real visible because Garrison doesn't want it to be a Lake Wobegon store.

I'm a firm believer in (novel, later movie) "High Fidelity." I tend to put things in lists of five. One book that never leaves my five list is "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page." G.B. Edwards wrote it in the voice of an irascible man who makes terrible choices. I've read it three times and it has never disappointed me.