Touching things in a store

[Lu]

Don't you just love that about Chinese book stores? You can just sit and read at your leasure, and later buy the book or not. If I try that back home I get yelled at.

(If it's really that bad with unsellable books, they could consider making one 本 of each title the one that people can read, and perhaps seal up the others for sale. That would keep both the wonderful reading in bookstore culture and the books-to-sale intact.)

[adrianlondon]

In the UK (well, ok, I only know about London) many of the bookshops have coffee bars in them. I assume they make enough profit from them to be able to write off a few books.

It's perfectly acceptable to take a book and sit in the coffee bar reading it. Someone collects them all every now and again and re-shelves them. However, if I ever actually buy a book now I always open it to check for coffee stains and muffin crumbs.

[muyongshi]

Isn't that what Barnes and Nobles does as well? It obviously is a lot bigger here but I'm sure people do it in the states at least to a degree...