Talk:Book Off

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Japan To-do:

[edit] PoV

I read: The trademarks of the stores are their large surface area and bright, clean atmosphere. Well, yes. Another is the tiresome (to me, though perhaps not to you) chants by the employees. I also read: The large scale of the stores makes it reasonably likely that a shopper will be able to find the books he or she is looking for. I almost never find the books I'm looking for. What I'm looking for tends instead only to be available at one or other of two stores in Jinbōchō, at ridiculous prices that I refuse to pay. (But I don't shoplift either.) Again, this is merely my "OR". -- Hoary (talk) 10:47, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I wrote those lines. Basically my objective is not to glorify Book Off, but to identify the elements of the company that have led to its undisputed success. Most used bookstores in Japan are small and cramped and Book Off created a store design that was more comparable to a new book store than a used one, attracting a clientele that normally would not have ventured into a used bookstore. Personally I enjoy a good cramped bookstore but that has nothing to do with it. The scale is even more important. If you're looking for a specific book, hunting for a used copy in a bunch of different small bookstores is a hassle for casual readers (although book lovers may enjoy it) since the odds of it finding it are slim. But once a used bookstore is as large as a new one, you can actually go to it with a reasonable expectation that you will find it. OF COURSE if you have a taste for obscure books this will not be the case for you, but Book Off did not succeed by catering to bibliophiles, they cater to people who are mostly looking for well-known and popular books, which are very often available at Book Off. And it turns out there was a lot of money to be made doing this.

If you take out these lines because of POV concerns, you will take away what is distinctive about Book Off and make the entry poorer for it. --JSLR 14:13, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I take your points, but I think the article represents "OR". My own "OR" is no more valuable than yours, and is very likely less valuable. Still, I've provisionally added it to the article, as it seems to complement yours. But really, this is no way to create a WP article.
Incidentally, I do once in a while find good stuff in BO. Once, to my amazement, I found a copy (half price of course) of 日本の写真家 (Nichigai Associates), an arid though useful reference work I'd previously only seen in very large public libraries. On my birthday this year, I strolled into a BO in one of the tonier parts of Tokyo and found one of the largest books of the works of Lartigue going for ¥2300, perhaps one quarter or one fifth of the RRP. But really, as a whole BO strikes me as one of the drearier used bookstores: I can think of four alternatives more or less on my way to work that are smaller than any BO yet consistently more interesting than even the largest BO on my way to work. And no, the railway line doesn't pass near Jinbōchō, and none of these four is well known (as far as I know).
OR also tells me that a key to BO's success is the way it has somehow managed to get lots of people to sell it their books for almost nothing. -- Hoary (talk) 15:10, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
I incorporated your changes and rewrote the article a bit using other information I have seen and read. Although you called the artcle OR, in fact everything I wrote I got from other sources, although these are not citable. Some of it comes from Japanese TV programs I have seen, some from the Japanese Wikipedia article on Book Off and most actually comes from references of Book Off that I read in The Economist. Unfortunately their articles are not available for free online and can't be cited. Unless there's something demonstrably false in what I wrote I think the article is worth keeping more or less as is. If other sources become available that can be cited, then by all means the information in them should be added to the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by JSLR (talk • contribs) 19:37, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
I just checked out the Japanese wiki page for the first time in a while and there's a lot of material critical of Book Off. If you feel the article is too imbalanced, feel free to take some of the material from them and put it in the English article. I think this would be better than just erasing the information in the English article that could be of value.--JSLR 19:45, 17 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by JSLR (talk • contribs)
Here's a quote from the Japanese wiki page just so you know I'm not just making this stuff up: それまでの、本の古本屋の形をうち破り、「新古書店」と呼ばれる新しい古本屋の形態を作り上げた。店内はコンビニエンスストアの様な照明にし（マツモトキヨシを参考にしている）、店舗面積を広めにとり、さらに臭さを抜くための対策を施し、立ち読みも可能にした。これが受け入れられ、チェーンが爆発的に広がった。--JSLR 19:50, 17 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by JSLR (talk • contribs)
Sorry to be unpleasantly harsh, but there's no guarantee that the writer(s) of the ja:WP article didn't make it up. Wikipedia is not a reliable reference source, as we all know too well, and should not be cited. On the other hand, if the ja:WP page is well constructed (and most ja:WP pages are not), then it will specify its sources, which one can then look up.
There's nothing wrong about citing the Economist: for one thing, there's nothing wrong about citing printed sources -- as long as they are good printed sources (and, at least when it's not editorializing, the Economist is good) -- so the Economist articles don't have to be on the web at all, let alone available free.
The TV programs would have to be cited specifically. In general, though, citing TV programs is a bad idea, as such citations are very hard to verify.
NB I'm not saying that the resulting article on BO is biased. Indeed, the charge that the stores [shave] the edges off the pages of books using a special machine in order to make them appear newer is new to me -- by which I don't mean to imply that it's untrue, or even that I don't believe it; merely that you've made BO more horrible than I'd dared imagine. (You've also added indubitably good stuff, e.g. the reminder that sellers of new books can't discount them.)
Oh, in my experience BO staff do their shouting when customers walk in or when prompted by just about anything else, perhaps boredom or instructions to should at least once per so many minutes. Though the do seem to have toned it down a bit recently, and I also get the impression that the tonier branches (e.g. the one in Jiyūgaoka, with its swish cafe) minimize it. -- Hoary (talk) 00:48, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV tag

Sentences that say things like, "Another innovation widely cited for its success" and "The large scale of the stores makes it reasonably likely that shoppers seeking widely-available books will be able to find what they are looking for" without citations means the article is written from the editor's POV. Cla68 (talk) 06:16, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

So edit it to remove the POV. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 06:27, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
I'd have thought that rather than indicating PoV, "Another innovation widely cited for its success" cries out for a source: a source saying that this is an innovation and has been widely cited, or a source saying that this is an innovation and (groan) multiple sources citing it for the stores' success, or similar. As for the latter claim, it strikes me as a fact verifiable by anybody who goes to a Book Off store. Now, if the store, singular, were already closed or otherwise elusive or exclusive, this would present a problem; but as the stores, hugely plural, are easily accessible to dozens of en:WP editors, I don't think it does. Do you have any reason to doubt the claim, Cla68? -- Hoary (talk) 02:05, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
I have visited Book Off! stores several times. If I wrote my impressions of them in this article, that would violate the WP:NOR policy. Reference the statements to a reliable source and there's no problem. The sources don't even need to be in English. If Yomiuri Shimbun says, in Japanese, that Book Off! is the greatest used book store in Japan because of it's "many innovations", then that can said in the article along with the citation. Cla68 (talk) 02:49, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
I added one reference from The Economist that mentiones a couple of the points in the Wiki article, there are many more articles mentioning Book-Off that I have read in that magazine but their online search function is very poor (a search for "Book-Off" doesn't even find the article I cited) and I can't track all of them down. If anyone else can find those articles, please either list them here or reference them in the text at the appropriate places.--JSLR 14:04, 31 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by JSLR (talk • contribs)