A Home for the Soul--Bookshops in Taiwan

In the old days, bookstores in Taiwan shared a number of common features: They were invariably run by men in sweat-stained shirts and black-rimmed glasses; they had creaky old fans hanging from the ceiling, laboring to stir the hot air in their dimly lit interiors; and their every corner was filled with patrons who spent entire afternoons engrossed in a book, some even creasing the corner of a page so they could pick up where they had left off the next time they visited. Loitering in bookshops reading books for free was one of the greatest pleasures of those poverty-ridden days.

Most of the old bookstores on Kuling Street and Chungking South Road in Taipei, as well as those in Taiwan's smaller cities and towns, were managed by owners who handled nearly everything themselves, from selecting and printing their stock to selling it. Chang Chuan-tsai, who has been working in the industry for over ten years, recalls how Chungking South Road's bookshop owners used to use the early mornings to drill their employees. The would have their clerks line up on either side of the aisles, then call out, "I want A Guide to Civil Law!" or some such. The clerks, who knew the shop inside and out, would then run to fetch a copy from among the disorganized piles of books that filled the shop. The drills were perhaps the most cultured "war games" of the period.

In the early 1980s, Senseio, then primarily a textbook publisher, and Kaosha Textiles also entered the bookselling business. Kaosha was particularly aggressive, using large, well-lit shops that were clearly organized, and a modern style of business management to attract readers to its Kingstone Bookstores. Kingstone further ingratiated itself with readers with its bestseller lists, which quickly became known as a reliable indicator of mainstream readers' tastes.

By the 1990s, foreign booksellers had also set up shop in Taiwan, but lacked a firm grasp of the local market. Flat sales at Japan's Kinokuniya, for example, which had opened shops inside Taipei's Sogo department store, forced the company to put its expansion plans on the back burner. France's FNAC, a retailer of both books and electronics, experienced similar problems breaking into the Taiwan market. Taiwan's own Eslite was much more successful. Established in 1989, it quickly made its way to the head of the class, becoming Taiwan's leading bookstore brand.

In more recent years, the appearance of another dozen or so large bookstores that, inspired by the "Eslite phenomenon," have sought to establish their own unique ambiance, has fostered diversity in the local reading market.

This year, for example, Singapore's Page One chain opened its first store in Taiwan. The company has started off in grand style with a 2300-square-meter readers' paradise designed by Singaporean architect Tan Kay Ngee and located in the world's tallest building-Taipei 101. Appearance aside, the store also offers the largest variety of original-language books available in Taiwan, Hong Kong or mainland China, some 160,000 volumes.

Kingstone, which is largely known as a retailer of bestsellers and business and management texts, is now making an effort to give its brand a more highbrow sheen. To that end, the company last year hired writer and dramatist Feng Kuang-yuan to run its planning department, and this year opened My Library, a Kingstone with a more literary focus located near Taipei's Ta-an Forest Park.

The proliferation of bookshops taking their own tack in the marketplace has been of enormous benefit to Taiwan's readers. The industry too has a positive take on the situation-whether speaking about international booksellers' efforts to establish a beachhead in Taiwan, or the revitalization of local bookshops, the conclusion of bookshop owners is the same: "This kind of competition is beneficial to us all. We aren't fighting for a bigger piece of the pie; we're trying to bake a bigger pie." With this issue, Sinorama begins a series on bookshops of interest around Taiwan in the hope that we might foster a love of books and reading, which so enrich our lives.

Singapore's Page One bookstore chain opened its first Taipei store at the beginning of this year with a splash-the Taipei 101 location is reputed to offer more titles in their original languages than any other store in Taiwan, Hong Kong or China.

At the start of this year, Kingstone Books opened its first My Library, a shop with a more literary bent than the typical Kingstone location. The company's plan is to give its mass-market reputation a more highbrow sheen.