TOKYO — Best-selling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's latest book has gone on sale, with 90 percent of the release claimed by a single buyer.
Major bookstore Kinokuniya says it ordered 90,000 of the 100,000 copies of the first print run of Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation to shake up the local publishing market.
Kinokuniya is supplying 50,000 of those copies to other bookstores to ensure online booksellers don't shut them out of the sales of the collection of essays, which began Thursday.
Japan's book market remains resilient, with tens of thousands of titles each year and many small bookstores, despite the rising popularity of e-books and online buying. But Kinokuniya says that's thanks largely to a distribution system that results in huge waste and unnecessarily high costs.
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Major bookstore Kinokuniya says it ordered 90,000 of the 100,000 copies of the first print run of Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation to shake up the local publishing market.
Kinokuniya is supplying 50,000 of those copies to other bookstores to ensure online booksellers don't shut them out of the sales of the collection of essays, which began Thursday.
Japan's book market remains resilient, with tens of thousands of titles each year and many small bookstores, despite the rising popularity of e-books and online buying. But Kinokuniya says that's thanks largely to a distribution system that results in huge waste and unnecessarily high costs.
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