Book aquarium

Last theme day, I showed you the cozy corner inside A Different Bookstore's Eastwood City branch. This is what the shop looks like from the outside. You can't see the couch from this angle—it's on the left side, near the back. The bookstore doesn't have its own café inside but there's really no need for one anyway. To the right of the bookstore is a Starbucks, across it is a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and along the open-air promenade is a Café Xocolat. You'll find me at Coffee Bean with a mug of tea latte. The bookstore is open until midnight, and the cafés—well, we've never stayed out there long enough to see them close shop.

Cozy corner

THEME DAY: BOOKS • I remember a time when most bookstores in Metro Manila were glorified stationery and school supply stores. What books they had were mostly textbooks, reference books and required school reading. A friend in the publishing business once told me that the biggest bookstore chain in the Philippines actually bought 'discards'—I don't really know how to call it: when publishing houses in the U.S. would gather up the remaining copies of almost-sold-out old inventory and sell them by weight. All that's in the past now, thanks to book-loving entrepreneurs who decided about fifteen years ago that Filipino readers deserved more than that. A Different Bookstore is not big and the in-store selection isn't very wide, but the titles and authors are well-chosen, and you can order any book you want that you can't find in the store. They were one of the first bookstores to encourage browsers to sit down and read a few pages—or even an entire chapter—so one can decide whether to get a book or not. If you're a regular customer and you give them your email or cellphone number, they'll inform you whenever they have sales. Many excellent bookstores have opened in the past decade, some larger, some smaller—and even that large chain was forced to re-think its corporate vision and now has better bookstores and well-trained staff—but A Different Bookstore will always occupy a warm spot in my heart.



Take a reading tour around the world through the lenses of CDP bloggers! Click here to view thumbnails for all participants.

Yet another

Looks like the lovely shopping and dining promenade that is Eastwood City Walk is not enough to serve all the residents and tenants of the many condominium and office towers of Eastwood City. Megaworld, the property developer, recently opened Eastwood Mall in the middle of a ring of towers, some of which are still being constructed. Some of the shops in the Walk have transfered to the mall, including the cozy A Different Bookstore (whose new store is no longer as cozy, unfortunately). The shops and restaurants in the mall are more upscale (Crisostomo is on the second floor of the mall, just above where the young girls are) and seem to be targeted to 40-somethings and older, while those at the Walk are trendier and younger. I guess I don't fit in their demographics—I still like the Walk better.