The Singapore Borders and the Power of Books

Around 1996, Borders opened a bookstore in Singapore. With about 50,000 books, it was much larger than any existing bookstore on the island. Freight cost about $1/book, a big improvement over the shipping costs if you bought a book online. Singapore, of course, is a very crowded place. Space was precious. You couldn’t own a lot of books because you didn’t have much space. One result was books were sold shrink-wrapped. The Borders books, however, were not shrink-wrapped. A great bookstore is like a great library — but only if the books aren’t shrink-wrapped. The first customers in the Singapore Borders would bring a book to the front desk and ask for the shrink-wrapped copy. But there was no shrink-wrapped copy.

Singapore newspapers started editorializing about how to behave in the new bookstore: Careful with the books. Handle them gently. They were trying to acclimate their readers to non-shrink-wrapped books. Why did editorial writers throw their weight behind a new business? Bruce Quinnell, the head of Borders at the time, thinks it is because they thought the new bookstore was such a wonderful thing. Thousands and thousands of books that had never before been on that island. Books are a commercial product but no other commercial product would inspire such a response.

The Singapore Borders was a huge success, at one point leading the entire chain in sales, and as far as I know is still thriving.