Bookstores: Delivery room for the birth of ideas
Chinab Chugh, Contributor, Jakarta
From ancient times to the present day, people have written and read a lot of books. Why are books so important to man? A bookstore or a bookshop is a retailer that sells books. In the 1980's, bookstores were not as common as they are now; but is it the power of the books or the knowledge inside them that has made them so popular?
Bookstores can range in size from local shops offering several hundred titles to large general bookstores offering upwards of 200,000 titles. Bookstores often sell items related to books such as newspapers and travel maps. Colleges and universities often have their own student bookstore on campus that focuses on providing course textbooks.
During the 1990s, many bookstores started to open cafes within their shops. Bookstores have even opened in public libraries, and sometimes even include coffee shops. Today it's rare to see a bookstore without a coffee shop and find information easily.
In recent years, a new kind of bookstore has become popular -- the online bookstore. Large online bookstores allow customers to check out prices and even buy books by using a computer. Online bookstores even allow customers to sell their used books.
In Singapore, education is vast and literacy is very high. Schools and universities in Singapore have become famous all over the world. And there are a lot of good bookstores to be found everywhere. In the MPH bookstore, Times, and Popular book company, books are reasonably priced and about 100,000 titles are kept at each bookstore.
It is mainly because of books that knowledge is increased. Different columns for each type of book are kept in each bookstore to make it easy for the customer to find books.
Indonesia has its own bookstores and some of them are very renowned in the world. General bookstores and public libraries can be found in the urban areas of Jakarta such as Jl. Sudirman. The UK Cambridge library is one of the most famous libraries in Indonesia. Bookstores, such as Gramedia, Gunung Agung, Kinokuniya, and QB have made it easy for people to find information and to buy at reasonable prices.
Recently, the sixth book of JK Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Half Blooded Prince" was released. It has posters in all bookstores and especially at online bookstores. It is said that JK Rowling got the idea for got the idea of writing a fiction book in a coffee shop in the UK.
A good book is like a lamp that lights up and makes us laugh and cry. Is it still very hard to beat that amazing old invention -- the book! A bookstore, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas -- a place where history comes to life.