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SINGAPORE – BooksActually Independent Bookstore is closing its Yong Siak Street store and moving completely online.
The store, which turns 15 this year, closed its physical store this year during the breaker period and has not reopened since. At midnight on Sunday (September 13), owner Kenny Leck announced that he would be fully online.
Leck, 41, wrote on Facebook: “It’s a new beginning for all of us … As horrible as the pandemic has been, it has also given BooksActually its ‘Sea Legs Online Store.’ After almost half a year of being Just an online store, now we’re ready to make it happen. “
He told The Straits Times that the web store, which expanded during the circuit breaker, is performing better than the physical store by about 10 to 20 percent.
“We have more work ahead of us,” he added, citing his continued push to convert titles from BooksActually’s Math Paper Press publisher to hardcover editions by the end of the year.
Mr. Leck opened BooksActually in 2005 with then co-owner Karen Wai on the second floor of a Telok Ayer store.
In 2009, he sold a three-bedroom HDB apartment left to him by his late mother and used the proceeds to open a second bookstore on Club Street, which did not work.
The bookstore moved to its current location in Tiong Bahru in 2011, where it became the quaint literary haven it is today, with its shelves of antique knickknacks, a mystery book vending machine, and three beloved cats, Cake, Pico, and Lemon.
Leck often argued with rising rents and once dreamed that BooksActually would be the first bookstore in Singapore to own its own building, for which he had started a fundraising campaign to raise $ 2 million for a permanent space.
Covid-19 has put an end to that dream for now, but said it plans to continue hosting literary events when Singapore enters reopening phase three, and what events it is known to host, such as the annual #BuySingLit street party, 24. – Hour Bookstore and The World’s Loneliest Bookstore pop-up, will return.
“Regardless of the uncertainties or vulnerabilities that this year of change has imposed on all of us, one thing we know for sure is that the bookstore will be here for a long time,” he wrote on Facebook.
“Or at least as far as I’m concerned, I’m pretty sure that she, BooksActually, will continue to be her ‘neighborhood’ bookstore long after I’m gone.”
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