End of bookstores? Don't read too much into it

The Star/Asia News Network
I WAS at the Marylebone branch of Daunt Books last month, hailed by Lonely Planet as one of the world's greatest bookshops. The London bookstore is unique in many ways. With its long oak galleries, polished floors and enticing skylights, the bookshop offers books you don't normally find in ordinary shops. From outside it looks very unspectacular; step in and a new world awaits you. I have been to all kinds of bookshops in the United Kingdom - big and small -- from a stuffy yet astonishingly well-stocked cubicle belonging to a Jewish bookseller in Brick Lane to a religious books haven in Birmingham and a little corner shop selling nothing but poetry books in Glasgow. But Daunt Books stands above the rest. I have nothing against big chain bookshops. These are professionally managed, well-funded and efficiently run by an army of eager and willing helpers. Smaller chains and privately-owned bookshops have a role, too. You will be surprised what you can find in these little bookshops. The one belonging to H.P. Lovecraft in Greenwich Village, New York, is owned by a true book lover. He amazed me by introducing some very interesting "Malayan collections" he kept when I was there ("Life and Times of a New York Bookseller", July 12, 2003). Then there was the two-level "KnigoMir" bookstore I discovered in Vladivostok many years ago. I was surprised that in a Russian city in the easternmost civilised corner of Russia, known for its port, military garrisons and Trans-Siberian Railway, there was a bookshop that offered 50,000 titles and quite a good collection of publications in English. What would you do in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan? In a landlocked country of about four million souls, excitement equals lots of watching football and Russian and Hindi films. You'll be surprised at the level of discourse on literature and the arts there, probably a legacy of the old Soviet Union. There are many fine bookshops to surprise visitors. Conakry is not a city you might find exciting, being the capital of Guinea in West Africa. It has the feel of Kuala Lumpur in the 1950s. Someone brought me to the most famous bookshop in the city, sandwiched between a sundry shop and a dirty eatery. It has probably the best collection of books on voodoo, which is big business, I was told, in many parts of Africa. Bookshops reflect the mental health of a nation. Books are mirror to society. Perhaps it is true about the permanence of books in an impermanent world. Perhaps it is even true that the era of the printed book is at a crossroads. Books are now read online, on the iPad, even smart phones. The young are avoiding books. They simply spend too much time browsing the Internet. Let's get the facts right. A book is born every 30 seconds. A million titles are published a year. There are 167 titles per million habitants of the planet now, compared with 0.2 in the 1450s and 100 in 1950s. So do not write the obituary of books yet. Where do all these books end up? Many would be in the godowns waiting to be shipped to bookshops all over the world. Many remain there forever. Remember, for every best seller, there are 250 titles that barely move. Most titles will be displayed in the libraries but sadly, there are too few libraries to cater for so many books published. Some will end up in private collections, many gathering dust on the shelves, for these books are bought for posterity. No furniture was so charming as books, someone famously said. People simply buy more books than they can read. In the same breath, humankind writes more than it can read. Bookshops are closing, yes, but in fewer numbers compared to music and video stores. So there is still room for bookshops among mankind; at least for an addicted book browser like me. While it is true that books are getting more expensive, but what products are not? Books are not soap or deodorant. Books are products of human brains and intelligence. You simply don't mass produce creativity. What you are holding in your hand is the work of a literary person, slogging through many weeks or months of anxiety and sometimes despair and writer's block, trying to put his characters in shape and organising the plots and polishing the language to make it readable. The author is lucky to get his or her book published. For every published author there are probably 10,000 who are not as fortunate. Whether his or her book will end up in the stores of Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, undistributed or unsold, or a place at the MPH or Kinokuniya bookstores is another matter. Perhaps some of the world's authors would end up at Daunt Books or the Liberia El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires, Argentina, considered to be the most beautiful bookshop in the world, or one of the secondhand bookshops in Chowrasta Market in Penang. Talking about secondhand bookshops, no one can beat the Japanese. They even dedicated an area for such goods -- Jinbocho in the Chiyoda area. Jinbocho is home to the Tokyo Book Binding Club, Literature Preservation Society and many prestigious universities. It is better known as Tokyo's secondhand book district. This is a haven for book lovers -- you can find almost everything under the sun. I remember frequenting at least two bookshops there offering good collections of English titles -- Book Brother Genkido and Sobun-So Bookstore. At Genkido, you will find art books in all forms and sizes, some in English. I like to believe that is the best secondhand art bookshop in Japan. Sobun-So sells "antiquarian and fine books". There are many gems here, first editions that sell for thousands of ringgit. Like all things, Jinbocho is undergoing a transformation. I wonder how many of these bookshops will stand the test of time. I wonder, too, how long bookshops will last with the advent of online marketing, eBay and books on the Net. Perhaps book lovers are a romantic lot, harbouring the belief that book browsing is a fruitful pastime forever. I will still argue the case for books. I will certainly cherish the times I spent in big and small bookshops, in big cities and far flung towns and reminding myself of the splendour of the world of books. Alas, people like me are fast becoming dinosaurs. -The Star/Asia News Network