Used-book stores are also undergoing change. Native Books/Na Mea Hawai‘i at Ward Warehouse and museum shops focus on Hawaii and Oceania history, language, hula, navigation and other areas of interest to islanders. Dragon Gate Book Store at the Chinese Cultural Plaza is jammed full of Chinese titles and films. Hakubundo on Kapiolani Boulevard is geared toward Japanese titles as well as paper crafts. According to manager Carl Ashizawa, many of the burns are audiobooks, and the company is looking into creating print-on-demand Christian titles. Logos Bookstore on Halekauwila Street, a locally owned outlet for a national franchise, is focused on Christian readers and has a "Burn Bar" in the store that creates mix disks of Christian music. Pauline Books & Media on Bishop Street caters to Catholic readers. Big-box stores like Costco and Walmart generally have books for sale, geared toward recognized best-sellers and Hawaii-themed selections.īooks are also the bread-and-butter of specialty shops. The Islander Group, a distribution company evolved from the original BookLines distributor, has been successful in placing book racks in general-merchandise stores and military exchanges. There are still bookstores out there, and books can be found in a variety of locations other than bookstores. Queries to local outlets were referred to a corporate number in the firm’s mainland public relations office, which rang and rang. The last large bookstore chain in the islands is Barnes & Noble. The employees, often book-obsessed and trendy, bright nerds, were guides and pathfinders as much as salespeople. It was the "third place," as sociologists call it, a neutral ground different from home and work where strangers were welcome and friends could bump into each other and chat about the literary issues of the day. What loyal customers remember about Borders is that it was a place that celebrated the act of reading, providing thousands of books - often, more than your local library - in a welcoming location. The reasons for its demise are debatable, although a failure to pick up on e-book trends and electronic download titles is the suspected trigger du jour. The entire nationwide necklace of Borders stores is going out of business. He picks up scattered books, replaces them on the racks in author-betical order and keeps them in proper departments, even as those departments shrink as customers pick over the remains of the store’s inventory. To make it worse, he seems to be a Borders employee. "Business." "Corporation." "Greed." "Idiocy." "My God, my God!" Every once in a while, an angry phrase is audible. There’s a guy snarling to himself as he wanders the rapidly eroding canyons of book racks at the Ward location of Borders Books & Music.
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