Sophia books to close

As a fan of your work, I was excited (okay, really excited) when I saw that For the Win had gone live on your website last week. I will definitely buy a hard copy, but since I was between paycheques (and because I’ve discovered I genuinely enjoy reading books on my phone) I was thrilled to be able to start reading it immediately.

I’ve been reading it when I can over the last several days and just now–midnight, Pacific time–got to the point where you thanked Sophia Books. As a staff member, I can’t thank you enough for the acknowledgement. The personalized scene dedications to all the various bookstores in the ebook version is a fantastic touch which I enjoy immensely anyway, but to have our store singled out is a thrill and an honour that I know will resonate in all the staff.

So, it’s with a heavy heart that I have to break some bad news to you–Sophia Books will be closing its doors at the end of the month. We’ve done our best and done what we could, but in the end it wasn’t flagging book sales or changing mediums or any of the other problems that people cite when they talk about the ailing book industry that brought us down: our building got sold, our lease came up for renewal and we got slapped with an increase that no one could afford. We looked into moving, but it just wasn’t feasible–rents have spiked across the board. And the worst part is that this is becoming endemic. Since January, the city has lost Duthie’s, one of the longest running independent bookstores (and once a thriving chain), Once Upon a Huckleberry Bush (a children’s bookstore) and Elfsar (a well-respected and loved comic shop), all, so far as I have been led to believe, for more or less the same reason. This is the new face of Vancouver–an artistic and literary city that no longer has any independent booksellers (of new books) in its core. A metropolis where you have to go far out of your way to be able to browse through new releases. By way of example, White Dwarf, a science-fiction and fantasy bookstore, is the better part of an hour out of downtown. I don’t think they’re doing that well either, though their location and relative real estate rates might be a saving grace at this point.

I’m not sure what the future holds for Vancouver. I have a great love of ebooks as well as dead tree media (I am a bookseller, after all), and I’m sure there’s room for both of them to coexist in the years to come, but Vancouver as a city (with grossly disproportionate commercial rents) seems to have consciously or unconsciously made up its mind about the role of booksellers in its boundaries. And it’s a decision that rather depresses me. Sophia Books will continue its role as a wholesaler to schools and libraries, but from an office space, and there will no longer be a storefront where someone can browse through and randomly find a book of Pablo Neruda’s poetry with English and Spanish on facing pages, no longer discover vocabulary books of Nepali or Inuktitut. Yes, there are still several used bookstores and a few resilient sellers of new books in the Metro Vancouver area, but their presence isn’t something we can take for granted anymore. And even if it wasn’t horribly bad sales that did the latest raft of bookstores in, maybe that’s the lesson that can be taken away from all this: that bookstores are a privilege, not a right, and we should treasure what we have while we have it, because things can be snatched away so very, very quickly.

Yours Sincerely,
Chris Eng