It's Page One bookstore's turn to bite the dust in Singapore.

In Singapore, the bookstores we have until 2011 are Borders, Page One, Kinokuniya, Popular and Harris (an extension of Popular). The first three are the typical bookstores selling mainly books. Popular is more of a department store which sells stationery and a lot of miscellaneous stuff.

By the way, it's incredibly rare to find any mom and pop bookstores in Singapore. They vanished silently one by one with the advent of these mega bookstores. Anyway, those small bookstores were mainly selling stationery.

Before Page One was the closure of Borders Singapore in August 2011. That was a fine story. After Borders USA declared bankrupt, all focus was on what's going to happen to Borders Singapore. Borders Singapore told the media it was safe because it's operations were not linked to their USA counterpart. Then they stopped paying the rent and was forced out by the tenant. This, by the way, is how classic PR should be done. Always assure your customers everything is alright until everything is not.

Then came the announcement for Page One and Harris to close in February 2012.

I've never been to Harris.

So now we are left with Kinokuniya and Popular.

There are three Kinokuniya branches in Singapore. Two are always busy. I'm not sure if they are confident of surviving in the future. They certainly don't look like they are in danger of closing.

Popular should be safe because they focus on local market, selling textbooks and stationery. There aren't a lot of places you can buy stationery in Singapore, and importing stationery is a silly idea because of shipping cost.

The economics of selling books in Singapore has changed. It's in part because of global competition. Book prices are marked up significantly in Singapore compared to Amazon and Book Depository. They are marked up to the extend that even with a 20% discount offered by Kinokuniya, books are still cheaper from Amazon after shipping. It's incredible.

Books today are a commodity. I think people value convenience and price of getting them versus the idea of hanging out at bookstores. You can still hang out near books, I do that at the library — there are even cafes in the libraries here! But as far as purchasing patterns go, it's definitely towards convenience and price.

Kinokuniya seems to have a huge customer base who buy Japanese books. Importing books for Japan are extremely expensive. Kinokuniya should be safe.

I'm not sure if there will be any new bookstores brave or foolish enough to venture into Singapore for years to come.

What's left of the art book shelf.