A to Z of 2024: The bookstore is dead, long live the bookstore

SINGAPORE – Print culture was buffeted by cruel economic winds in 2024.

In successive months,

Times Bookstores exited

after nearly five decades of operations; SingLit bastion

Epigram Books posted notice that it will shut

its bricks-and-mortar store Epigram Coffee Bookshop; and

the landmark Thambi Magazine Store

in Holland Village shuttered.

The news was met with public groans that served only to underscore the relentlessness of the tragic trend.

It is a familiar story by now, with the culprits – high rents, poor readership and readers’ shift from physical books – painfully clear.

Yet, an extra hint of desperation could be detected when the book community

pointed an accusatory finger

at an unexpected contributor to the demise of bookshops.

Could the ubiquitous and well-stocked National Library be eating into booksellers’ profits? Would readers otherwise buy books if hard copies and e-books were not so readily available?

This thesis has generated a new angle and interest in longer-term discussions about subsidies for bookstores and goods and services tax exemptions on book sales, reigniting a sense of urgency that the fate of these spaces should not be left to the blind forces of the market.

Thambi Magazine Store’s closure in May was an emotional affair witnessed by a crowd of about 20, prompting tears from owner Periathambi Senthil Murugan.

His mourning was not out of place, for the shuttering marked an end to an operational history of more than eight decades, and was also a farewell to family lineage.

The store was founded by his grandfather P. Govindasamy in the 1940s. Despite allegedly not making losses, Mr Periathambi told the press that he felt the landlord’s demand that he remove all outdoor browsing shelves compromised too much of the newsstand’s character.

The Government stepped in to “develop some options”, but the passing of this institution looks to be a fait accompli.

Then came the expected but still seismic announcement by English book retailer Times Bookstores in September, which said it would allow the lease for its last remaining outlet at Cold Storage Jelita to run out.

The regional conglomerate once operated one of the largest bookstores in Singapore at 8,000 sq ft in Centrepoint. Its closure leaves Books Kinokuniya as effectively the last sizeable, mass-market bookstore giant in Singapore.

In sharp contrast, there is a veritable boom across the Causeway, with bookstore chains

Eslite from Taiwan and Tsutaya from Japan

setting up South-east Asia flagships in Kuala Lumpur.

Rental and manpower costs there are much lower, but the ecosystem is also blessed with landlords who see bookshops as traffic drivers and are happy to subsidise rentals.

Epigram Books cited high rentals in Singapore when it said in September that it will not be renewing its lease for its Tanjong Pagar Distripark outlet.

The first bookstore to sell only books by Singapore authors will move online after Jan 26. It marks one fewer physical outlet for the display and distribution of Singapore works so integral to national culture, belonging and criticism.

Amid the walloping, a bright spot is that

pockets of resistance have emerged

, especially among the young.

In Bukit Merah, freelance photographer Rebecca Toh started the first pay-to-rent community library, Casual Poet Library. In a collaborative feat, some 180 people paid between $43 a month for a two-year lease and $49 a month for a minimum six-month lease to curate shelves in the space with their own books for lending.

Users pay an annual fee of $25 to borrow up to five books at a time, both sides helping Toh defray start-up, operational and labour costs.

Then there is Chinese-language TBC Bookstore, opened by Singapore permanent resident Wu Di in a second-floor shophouse in New Bridge Road. While he sells books, members can also pay $39 a month to borrow a book for 30 days, get two free beverages and participate in book talks.

Meanwhile, the indie Singapore Art Book Fair has continued to thrive with its 10th edition at the Singapore Art Museum in October, proving that print – at least in the often more truncated but still creative form of zines – is not dead.

All these point to a continued appreciation of print as a medium for thought and expression, as well as bookstores as places of community and spontaneous encounter.

In the face of brutal economics, the passionate continue to prove that print is no vanity project.