For more than 30 years, Peggy Frank has watched people come through her doors at Book Mountain Paperback Exchange at 2101 Cerrillos Road looking for a good paperback to while away the hours.

Readership numbers were high as people bought general fiction (the most popular genre), romance, science fiction and other kinds of books for their reading pleasure.

But lately things have changed.

"People are not reading a lot of books," Frank said. "It seems that the number of readers is in decline. And we're not the only one" that's struggling with that.

The Borders store in Sanbusco Market Center closed several months ago, leaving one Borders, off Zafarano Drive, she noted.

Frank owns and operates Book Mountain with the help of her husband, Tom Juster, and a part-time worker or two.

As someone who has had the time to think about it, Frank believes there are various reasons for the falloff in readers.

For one thing, "Our readers have always been older people," Frank said, "and they bought a lot of books. But now their eyes are bad, and a lot of people have left town. They can't stand the elevation."

Another problem for Frank and other small-bookstore owners are the big book sellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. "They hurt our store," Frank said.

And then there's the e-book craze, which has infected many people — though not so much Frank's customers, who have tried e-books but then changed their minds.

"We have a lot of readers who don't like e-books," Frank said. "One lady who comes in here said she works in a state office, which consists of sitting in front of a screen all day. When she comes home, she wants to open a real book. There are plenty of others like her out there. ... But there's still not as many book readers as there used to be. Maybe that will change. Hopefully, these things are cyclical."

Another factor is that publishers are now publishing paperbacks as trade paperbacks, which are larger than older books and cost more to display because they don't fit on the shelves that other books do, Frank said.

"We had to reconfigure how we stock the shelves" to accommodate the new books, she said.

Despite the problems, Frank and Juster will carry on. "I'm 71, and I plan to keep running my store as long as my mind and body let me," Frank said. "I will die with my boots on, although I don't know what the future is."

Sometimes it's the past that's interesting, as when one customer brought in a Sanskrit dictionary, followed by another with a hieroglyphics dictionary. "We sold them very easily and for not much money," Frank said.

Frank and Juster particularly enjoy customers aged between 85 and 90 who come into the store. "I just love them," she said.

Frank is also a book lover herself, one who still remembers when she was a child and her father read to her every night.

"I wanted to read (myself), and my parents sent me to kindergarten. But then I came home and said I wasn't going back. They asked me why, and I said I hadn't learned to read that day. I wasn't going back until I learned to read."

Frank got her start in the book business years ago after she was injured in an auto accident and couldn't teach any more.

"We talked to the owner of Don's Paperback Book Exchange in Albuquerque and he showed us how to run a bookstore," Frank said. "We did comics for a while, but then we went in a different direction."

Frank said the bookstore has made a profit every year, but it's not something she likes to talk about. "I don't do it for the money," she said. "It's because I enjoy it. It's because I feel good about making reading material available for not much money."

Frank is also proud of the fact that's she's had young people work in the store over the years.

"A lot of them were students," Frank said. "They'd stay for a while, and then they move on. The one employee we have now has been here for five years. He's a part of the store."

Frank is also happy that her small store faces Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe's busiest street.

"Cerrillos Road is a great location," Frank said. In the retail business, "visibility is really important."