How are you supposed to know if you’ll like a book if you can’t read some of it.
It had a nice little cafe too, its not like they won’t make money on people buying a few coffees and snacks as they read a book they might not buy.
How are you supposed to know if you’ll like a book if you can’t read some of it.
It had a nice little cafe too, its not like they won’t make money on people buying a few coffees and snacks as they read a book they might not buy.
It was Tsutaya in Cambodia.
Is Fully Booked popular? I’ve never seen a bookstore do this, but its the first one I’ve seen in Cambodia so maybe lack of competition lets them get away with it.
Japan does love to wrap literally everything purchasable in stores in plastic. Abroad wouldn’t be immune to this since shared supply chains.
The whole idea plastic waste is bad doesn’t seem to have made it over to Asia.
When we wrap out books, it’s usually manga. But it’s weird for Tsutaya of all stores to do it because the ones here aren’t wrapped and they were the first to promote customers to read before purchasing.
I only saw hentai books wrapped in plastic in Japan but I didn’t go to many bookstores while there.
Hilariously before you named the store I was thinking back of my experience in exactly a Tsutaya in Tokyo.
Found some cool origami books that I had to take a chance on buying them, since I couldn’t look through them as they were also wrapped in plastic.
Extra fun tidbit, I bought them tax-free, which is super straightforward in Japan, and then they told me I should not remove the plastic wrap and “use” the books, since that would invalidate their tax-free status and I’d have to repay tax…
Fully Booked is popular, but that’s probably because it’s the only actual bookstore franchise in the Philippines. Most other book stores are family owned stores that sell used books. National Bookstore is a joke, and mostly sells stationary.
National could barely able to sell publications as by 2010s nearly everyone went to spend more time online – ebooks, social media, etc. – and even the browsers have disappeared as magazines started to end publication due to mass disinterest, so leaving the stationery business the only thing keeping it afloat.
Strangely, asides from Fully Booked and that small Japanese bookstore in an uppity part of Manila, the Big Bad Wolf book festival draws a large crowd of bookworms. That for used books, a chain called Booksale is still alive and well – there I bought a 20-year-old paperback copy of Blackhawk Down in fair condition.