So the Kinokuniya Bookstore near me closed
PostPosted:Sat Jul 21, 2012 5:14 pm
They're probably the biggest Japanese bookstore I know in southern California. The one in downtown LA is still open (I think, though their website is down), but the one in Costa Mesa was closed when I went there yesterday. I guess it's a bigger surprise how a speciality bookstore even stays alive when regular bookstores just keel over. I mean I know in their way-too-expensive section I'm probably one of the few guys who ever go there because I'd take out something expensive and put it back in the wrong place (not on purpose) and I'll come back 6 months later and it'd still be placed in the wrong place which implies no one else even touched it in that time. Yet the expensive stuff takes a lot of shelf space and apparently never sells at all. My brother always joked that I'm the one who keeps certain bookstore in business because I buy all kinds of weird stuff, but it's sort of true because you're not going to be able to operate a decent sized bookstore by selling 50 copies of One Piece each month. In fact the obscure stuff probably hurts them the most because they got to have it for completeness sake but it almost never sells and is just taking up room. For that matter, One Piece has something like 70 volumes but who the heck is going to buy volume 35? I can see it make sense to keep the last 5 volume and maybe the first 5 volume in case someone's starting new but volume 6-64 is just a pure waste of space and they definitely take a lot of space to place these stuff.
It seems like the guys selling the specialty stuff never got the memo that these days, everything can be scanned online. For example the boxed Fate/Side Side Material goes for something like $100, or you can go to Typemoon's site and just download the PDF version of it for free. You don't even need to pirate it because it's on the company's official site. Yes a PDF might not be as satisfying as the art book but when you talk about free versus $100 it's not exactly a hard choice. I realize the bookstore don't get to decide on these price since their MSRP is usually something like 8000 yen so maybe the source needs to also slash their prices down.
It seems like the guys selling the specialty stuff never got the memo that these days, everything can be scanned online. For example the boxed Fate/Side Side Material goes for something like $100, or you can go to Typemoon's site and just download the PDF version of it for free. You don't even need to pirate it because it's on the company's official site. Yes a PDF might not be as satisfying as the art book but when you talk about free versus $100 it's not exactly a hard choice. I realize the bookstore don't get to decide on these price since their MSRP is usually something like 8000 yen so maybe the source needs to also slash their prices down.