The closure of Eslite Spectrum Corp’s (誠品生活) 24-hour bookstore in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) after 18 years was “far from the end of an era,” thanks to the generations of readers nurtured by the outlet, company chairwoman Mercy Wu (吳旻潔) said yesterday.
At a news conference at the Xinyi store, Wu said that about 1 million people had visited the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer of traditional Chinese books this month.
This included more than 75,000 who visited the store on its penultimate day of operations Saturday, Wu said.
Photo: CNA
The Xinyi store officially closed its doors at 10:30pm yesterday.
Eslite’s Songyan outlet, in the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park in Taipei, would succeed the Xinyi outlet in staying open 24 hours a day from Jan. 20, next year. In the meantime, Wu said the Eslite bookstore on the fifth floor of the Nanxi store in Taipei’s Zhongshan District (中山) would run around the clock to bridge the gap.
Eslite is leaving its Xinyi premises after landlord Uni-President Group — which plans to transform the store into a shopping mall called “Dream Plaza” — declined to renew the bookseller’s lease.
Wu said she came to the Xinyi store every day to see messages left by customers, of which the top keywords were “youth” and “companionship,” drawing a different picture of the store’s customers from that of the Dunnan store, which closed in 2020.
Comparing the two stores, Wu said customers at the Dunnan store were mostly in their 50s — “which made me feel like a little girl” — while many at the Xinyi store were in their 20s and 30s.
“If the Dunnan store offers the public a place to pursue knowledge, I think the Xinyi store provided them with intellectual
Highlighting a message left by a customer expressing hope that “Taiwan will become an island of reading habits,” Wu said she took comfort knowing “such a remark does not come from a senior who holds a magnifying glass to read.”
“This is a big motivation for [Eslite] continuing to run 24-hour bookstores in the future,” she said.
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