1. Steamboy Dvd - saw that the vcd was out since last month... been wanting to get the dvd and luckily, managed to see it at Kino! Came with a free poster too.
2. Philip Pullman's Dark Materials Trilogy - i'm tired of reading incomplete book series... Bartimaeus Trilogy, Eragon, even Harry Potter... having to wait for so long for sequels.. so i decided to pick up a completed trilogy. Even though that i know that i could have and should have borrowed them from the public library....
3. Shel Silverstein's Runny Babbit - this book has been on my wish list ever since it came out... so naturally, got it.
Total cost of books and dvd? $103.85 - 20%= $83.08. So in the end, i just needed to pay $3.08 for all my items :)
Oh.. and while i was there? i came across a Sahara Clive Cussler promotion. With any purchase of books above $30 including a Cliver Cussler book will entitle you Sahara movie premiums. Hey... i bought the Sahara book from Kino a couple of weeks back and how come i didn't get the gift? So, i managed to speak to the manager, told him how i bought the Sahara book previously over the internet... got hold of the internet order.. and i got a very cool, classy and useful Sahara swiss army knife. can't wait to go camping with it.
Another thing.. i take back about wanting to work at kino or something simliar. i still want to be a personal shopper for books and matching readers with books. however, i think that it'd drive me insane to work in kino... customers treating the bookstore like a library cos they have all the popular materials to read.. with total disregard with the fact that the books are for sale.. and not for reading. Isn't ironic?
Kids spawling on the floor.. sitting everywhere... blocking the aisles and for hours i might add... i think that the staff there have a tougher job than librarians. At least we get some authority in controlling and enforcing the readers in the library.. and can tell them off politely if they are mistreating library materials and such. Don't think that the staff has that kind of enforcement. After all, you wouldn't want to offend a potential paying customer right?
Wonder if the bookstore have any guidelines to handle such unbecoming behaviour in the bookstore or have the staff grown oblivious to it. Oh.. and does it and would it mean that in order to cover for the damaged items, the books are priced at a higher price to cover the costs?
if it is happening or that is happening... it'd be dreadful. sigh.. wonder if anyone can give insights into that.
Apart from that..things/events to look forward to:
Neil Gaiman's visit to Singapore on 3-6 July
Now.. who's been saying that Singapore is boring... With all these events coming up, i'm going to be broke.. unless some kind soul out there is going to get me tickets for my birthday!! :)
1 comment:
Re: Bookshop browsers. This is why some bookshops here shrinkwrap virtually everything but the cash register.
As a former bookseller I was all for for people browsing, but it used to irk me every time I came across browsers who didn't know how to 'browse properly'. Like, open the book really wide, creasing the spine, or flipping through the book roughly. Worse is when they DO decide to buy a copy, they dig through the shelf for a pristine copy. That's why some bookshops now will wrap everything and set aside one browsing copy, or for more expensive items, you'd have to bring the item to the counter, have it unwrapped and you'd have to browse it then and there. For some of the cheaper stuff like magazines and newspapers, where shops hardly make any profit, they might even refuse browsing.
Where I worked we did have the authority to tell people off (politely and discreetly) if they were mishandling our books. People rarely kicked up a fuss because of the way we put it across. I mean, it's like staining a white shirt with lipstick in the process of trying it on. The shop will simply tell you that you'd have to pay if you're not careful.
Depending on the agreement with suppliers, most books are sold on a returnable basis, so unsold stock in saleable condition can be returned and exchanged for new titles. That said, we still had a fair number of books which we had to write-off and discard simply because they were 'over-browsed', mishandled and not fit even for our warehouse sale.
I think the situation in Kino is not as bad as Borders actually. where you'd have to beat away browsers with a stick to get to the magazine shelf you want.
- QueerLibrarian
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