The bookstore war on Orchard Road: a study of contemporary sponsors of literacy and ideologies of globalized book retailing in Singapore

Abstract

Based on a year’s worth of fieldwork in Singapore, this article is a case study of the much-publicized ‘bookstore war on Orchard Road’ that pitted Borders’ American ‘loosey-goosey’ model of bookselling against Kinokuniya’s ‘serious’ Japanese model. It examines the distinctive role that country-of-origin effects play in the cultural practices and perceptions of these two global sponsors of literacy, which have in recent decades rivaled traditional sponsors of literacy such as libraries in guiding individuals on ‘what, when and how’ to read. An analysis of the Orchard Road bookstore war captures some of the competing ideologies of textual practices circulating in Singapore as cosmopolitan print consumers and their professional counterparts express their acceptance and/or rejection of particular bookselling practices. For the professionals, good bookselling involves the promotion of local print cultures. In contrast, the cosmopolitan consumers seldom mentioned this criterion. In fact, many of them were drawn to the ‘globality’ of transnational booksellers. While print professionals clearly favored Kinokuniya’s globalization localization practices over Borders, a clear-cut preference did not emerge among cosmopolitan consumers. This study suggests that country-of-origin effects likely informed the way in which print professionals and cosmopolitan consumers perceived Borders and Kinokuniya and the globalization localization strategies of these global sponsors of literacy.