Abstract

The author describes a typical day as a bookshop owner. Her store is in the arcade on Market Central Avenue, near the famous Makishi Public Market in Naha City, Okinawa. She owns an approximately 10 m2 store where she sells used books, mostly about Okinawa. She has no employees, so when she leaves the store, she asks a neighboring shopkeeper to watch her shop, a favor that she returns. Her store is open from around noon until 6:00 p.m. but she also performs stocking, shipping, and other tasks during the morning.
Her first experience with the book-selling business was in 1998, when she was a first-year college student and started working part-time at a bookstore. While looking for a job, she was attracted to selling books because she had an idea of what the job entailed, and she considered selling books as a good way of supporting people wanting to accomplish something. She thus started working for a national chain of retail bookstores, transferred from a Tokyo branch to one in Okinawa in her seventh year, quit in her ninth year, and has been running her current store ever since.
Opening a store generally requires courage, but in the author’s case, a secondhand bookstore in her neighborhood was about to close up, so she took over and started running it herself. The shop was in a good location, so she figured that with the right stock, sales should be pretty good. She decided to focus on selling books about Okinawa.
The author describes the difference between selling new and used books. She decided to sell used books because doing so gave her the freedom to set her own prices, and thus better control her margins. The downside of secondhand bookstores is that they cannot count on the steady sales of bestsellers or popular magazines, and it is harder to circulate inventory. Inventory must also be paid for up-front, and unsold books cannot be returned. The internet has also made it easy to find the cheapest source, so she is easily underpriced. Such difficulties are thus the flipside of the freedom of owning her own store.

Author’s Information

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