For all the Japanese movies, tv shows, videogames I watched and played, I always marveled at the quaintness of their used book stores. Small shops where books are piled all around, run by a very old married couple whose children grew up and moved into the big city.
Taiwan used to have shops like this around many of it's universities, but a few years back people discovered that the area around universities are prime places to put specialty restaurants and clothing stores. So most of those old book stores are gone.
This does not mean that book stores are not popular however. In fact huge multi-floored book stores are all the rage in Taipei. Many people spend hours at the bookstores just sitting down on the floor and reading the books. The stores don't kick people out for reading the books. I have a lot of friends who will read whole books over the span of a few visits to the bookstore. I don't see how the stores make money, but it is nice of them.
These giant bookstores are so popular and have so many people visiting them, that many have expanded to include their own department stores. Perhaps allowing so many people to come everyday to read, is an ingenious way of getting people to often visit your location and then go shopping at the department store. Clever.
Personally, I don't spend much time at these bookstores, but there is one of them that i really like. It's a store where if they don't have the book you want, they will order it for you. A service that is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo rare for any type of store in Taiwan. It's a service that i really appreciate so when I buy books, I try to go out of my way to get books from this store. I hope that by only eating and shopping at stores and restaurants which actually care about their customers, that in the future only stores like that will survive. One can only hope.
Anyway, above is one of the few old style used book stores that I've seen still around. I didn't go in as I didn't want to wake up the owner. There was another one across the street that I went in and it had a lot of old magazines. As far as I could tell they weren't of any significance, just various old magazines. I'm actually getting more and more curious about this and want to go back and ask what that is all about.
Oh, i should say there are still second hand book stores in Taiwan, quite a few, however now a days they are more modernized, and usually have a cafe attached to them. Hooray for progress?
