[Opinion] Bookstore

The stage for the movie “You’ve Got Mail,” starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, is set at “a bookstore around the corner.” It is an old village site where adults bring their children after also being taken to the bookstore by their parents when they were young. These kinds of bookstores no longer remain as a commercial store. It is a comforting and welcoming place whenever you visit, filled with the memories and scent of each and every villager. Even in Korea, one might cherish more or less this kind of village bookstore if one is from the city.

Instead of giving a cold look, the good-natured owner gives a smile as he looks over his glasses even if the customer has been reading a book for a while in the small bookstore. The bookstore in front of the school was a favorite place for students bursting with intellectual curiosity. The owner of the college bookstore, often known as “uncle,” informed us when a book we wanted was going to be in store and became a friendly companion. One by one, the village bookstore started closing until one day it reached the point where it is now difficult to find a bookstore nearby. Even if there was a bookstore, the atmosphere nowadays is very much different than the subdued air of the past as the store mainly deals with middle school and high school reference guides.

Among the various reasons as to why village bookstores are disappearing, the dumping strategy of Internet bookstores could be one of the bigger factors. As several Internet bookstores drastically knock down book prices and offer free shipping, it struck a big blow to bookstores which maintained fixed prices. Although the principle of applying market logic to the publishing market is agreeable, a complementary method to avoid “the market failure” should be sought if readers become victims of this principle. Wary of Internet discounts, publishing companies raised the price excessively, making the purchasing power dwindle as the publishing firms fall further in the mire of economic depression.

It is not because of attachment to the “memory of the bookstore” of one’s student life that readers adamantly choose to visit bookstores even if they have the Internet. There is a humanly inner resource in the bookstore. Sniffing the scent of the book and choosing a book together within the same space inside the bookstore are attractive and romantic aspects of the bookstore which are hard to abandon even in the digital era. Is “the bookstore around the corner” an impossible dream where a mother and her child continue to visit in succeeding generations? Although many different things offline have been disappearing shoved by the wave of this era, I am reluctant to give up hope that the bookstore could be an exception.

Editorial Writer Hong Chan-sik chansik@donga.com