SINGAPORE - Independent bookshop The Moon is closing its brick-and-mortar store in Chinatown at the end of the month, as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to cause churn in the books scene here.
Owner Sarah Naeem, 31, said this was due to high rental costs. As her landlord was intending to increase the rent, she said, she decided not to renew the lease after it is up in February and to scale back instead to a pop-up and online model.
Despite government aid such as the Jobs Support Scheme, she said that the constant fluctuation in pandemic regulations made it hard to keep the business going.
"I feel like 2020 was still manageable, but 2021 was particularly challenging because the moment a new regulation would come into place, customers would lose steam, the staff would lose steam, I would lose steam.
"It just didn't seem feasible to keep going at this rate."
The Moon opened at 37 Mosque Street in September 2018 as a bookstore, cafe and event space on the first and third floors of a shophouse.
Its last day will be on Jan 31. The preceding weekend, it will hold a "casual closing party" with events such as journalling sessions and book clubs.
At present, the store has 14 staff, but by the end of the month, it will have four full-time and two part-time staff. The rest will be let go.
"It definitely wasn't an easy decision to make," said Ms Naeem. "Everybody cried a lot. I cried a lot when I had to let them know."
The past year has been fraught for Singapore's books scene. Independent bookstore BooksActually shut its Tiong Bahru brick-and-mortar shop in September 2020 to move online. A year later, it came under fire due to a Rice Media expose on owner Kenny Leck's alleged relationships with young female employees.
Huggs-Epigram Coffee Bookshop, founded by publisher Epigram Books and coffee chain Huggs in 2019, had to close temporarily in August last year at the Urban Redevelopment Authority Centre due to struggles with rent, though it reopens this Thursday (Jan 6). In the interim, Epigram ran a pop-up bookshop for five months in Beach Road.
It has not all been bad news, however. In September last year, new Chinese-language bookstore Sea Breeze Books opened in Tanjong Katong Road.
Ms Naeem said she hopes The Moon can return as a brick-and-mortar store someday. "But this is just not the best time for a physical bookstore."
