An American tourist, David Willis, found himself locked in a London Waterstones bookshop which had closed while he was still browsing.
Westfield is certainly a strange bedfellow for the bookshop, which has an anti-corporate streak built into its narrative.
The imperiled St. Mark's Bookshop, which has been on life support because of declining sales and rising rent, has gotten a reprieve.
You can go straight into the bookshop (which has a fair selection of English-language titles) or up to the first-floor cafe.
Yet Bramhall, a satellite town (residents prefer to say village) to the south of the city has two: Simply Books, which opened four years ago, and Bramhall Village Bookshop, which has been here for 37.
A campaign is under way to try to save a Surrey bookshop which has been a local landmark for 75 years.
Next door, visit the "World's Oldest Continuously Operating Book Store," the Moravian Bookshop, which has many books and a dizzying number of gifts, home goods and even food.
The chain arrived there in 1999, after Stephen B. Kaufman, then an assemblyman living in Throgs Neck, grew tired of driving to the Barnes & Noble in Yonkers to purchase books he couldn't find in one of the borough's two small independent bookshops, both of which have since closed down.
But Amazon is focused on further expansion – new countries, new products (from Alexa voice recognition speakers to healthcare and home robots), into bricks and mortar stores (some of which have replaced bookshops that Amazon had put out of business) – and making even more money.
Online booksellers now represent the third-largest trading network in France, behind independent bookshops and big cultural chains (such as Fnac), both of which have 23% market share.
