For years, whenever a bookshop in Singapore made the news, it was for one reason: it was closing down. "The narrative in Singapore, whenever a bookshop is mentioned in the press, it is an obituary," Ibrahim, founder of Wardah Books in Kampong Glam, told me before the event. It was a narrative he and 19 other bookshop owners across the island set out to rewrite this October, when Singapore held its first Independent Bookshop Day (SGIBD), a three-day, island-wide celebration of the small, specialist bookshops that had quietly built devoted communities of their own.
I spoke to six of the participating bookshops in the lead up to the event: Wardah Books, Epigram Books, City Book Room, Book Bar, Dakota Dreams and Wormhole. None of them looked, sounded or stocked their shelves the same. None of them talked about each other as competition either. They talked about believing that reading was for everyone, and that the best way to prove it was to work together.
The Readers Were Never Gone
It's easy to assume that a shrinking pool of readers is squeezing independent bookshops out of business. The bookshops I spoke to pushed back on that assumption. "I find that there's a lot more reading these years, people will say otherwise, but I find that there's a lot more groups of people forming book clubs," Chloe from Epigram Books said. The rise of the SG Culture Pass, she added, had made more Singaporeans willing to pick up a local title they might never have tried before.
What had changed, she suggested, wasn't whether people read, but where that reading community lived. Niche hobby groups, book clubs and online reading circles had become the new engine of readership, and niche indie bookshops, rather than losing out to that shift, had ended up perfectly placed to serve it. A shop built around one specific readership, whether Islamic literature or Chinese fiction, could cultivate a small, engaged community in a way a general bookstore never could.
Bookshops in Every Shape
Walking into each of the six shops made it obvious that "indie bookshop" wasn't one thing in Singapore. Wardah Books sat in the heart of the Malay Muslim heritage district of Kampong Glam, built originally on English language books on Islam before expanding into philosophy and poetry as its owners recognised how wide their readers' interests actually ran. City Book Room occupied a residential condominium unit along Joo Chiat Road, its shelves given almost entirely to Chinese literature, from Singaporean writers like the late Yeng Pway Ngon to authors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and China. A short drive away, Dakota Dreams tucked itself above the Old Airport Road Food Centre, a bookshop sharing its neighbourhood with hawker stalls rather than other retailers. And Wormhole never had a physical shop at all. It operated entirely online, and instead brought its community together through book clubs and its now well known PowerPoint Parties, evenings where guest speakers turned slide decks into informal talks about anything.
Between them, the six shops carried almost entirely different selections: English books on Islam, Chinese literature, Singaporean and Southeast Asian fiction. Genre and geography didn't tie them together. A book, it turned out, could find its reader almost anywhere.
Collaboration Over Competition
None of the owners I spoke to described themselves as rivals. The idea for SGIBD had come out of a group chat these booksellers were already using to swap notes and support one another. "We all decided to band together to create this day together," Chloe from Epigram recalled. The group settled on one rule from the outset: no discounts, no sales. "People shouldn't be going to bookshops just to purchase books cause they are cheap," she explained. "We should all celebrate books and bookstores and authors and the whole ecosystem that makes up literature."
This was the logic behind how the event itself was run: a shared belief that a bigger reading culture benefited every shop rather than threatening it. Rather than pooling into one shared venue, each shop hosted its own programming so that its personality came through. Wardah Books held a batik matching session that traced the significance of traditional motifs. Epigram Books ran a blind book swap where strangers traded wrapped, unlabelled titles. City Book Room paired zine makers with writers who had returned from creative writing stints in the UK. The philosophy was shared even where the programming wasn't: get people through a door they had never opened.
Curation as an Antidote to the Algorithm
Ask any of the booksellers what a small shop offered that a bestseller list or a recommendation algorithm couldn't, and the answer converged quickly on one word: curation. Tan Waln Ching, who founded City Book Room after being inspired by the late writer and bookseller Yeng Pway Ngon, put the distinction plainly: "Bookstore is different from library, because we have a different curation." A library or an online retailer optimised for what a reader already wanted. An indie bookshop owner, working with limited shelf space and years of reading behind them, made an argument for what a reader hadn't yet discovered, but should.
The curation was crafted to be personal, not data driven. At Book Bar, the selection reflected its founders' own reading, Singaporean authors first, expanding outward into Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indian fiction, because "when we opened here, we decided we wanted to continue supporting the local authors." At Wardah, a shop that started out distributing books on Islam had grown to stock philosophy and poetry precisely because its owner recognised the readership he served was "interested in so many things." A recommendation engine narrows a reader's field of view toward more of the same with every click. A bookshop, curated by a person with taste and blind spots of their own, did the opposite. It put something unfamiliar in your hands on purpose.
A Book as Common Ground
Another theme every bookseller returned to was conversation, the particular kind of exchange that happened when a stranger recommended a book, or two people from entirely different worlds discovered they had read the same obscure title. "You can get to talk to the owners of the bookshop, then you can talk about the books that you like to read and be recommended books," Chloe said. "That form of communication, you can't get it anywhere else."
Epigram's blind book swap ran on that same idea: two strangers wrapped up books they loved but that "nobody talks about," traded them unseen, and walked away holding a stranger's private enthusiasm. The same idea explains why Waln Ching brought zine makers and diaspora writers into City Book Room's English language programming rather than keeping her Chinese and English audiences apart. A shared book became a shared reference point between people who might otherwise have had nothing in common, a starting point for conversation that didn't depend on where either of them was from.
The Medium Still Mattered
When I asked Ibrahim which book he returned to again and again, he named Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. He called it a book that "radicalised" him a little, one that "underscores the importance of the written word as an important part of discourse." Postman's case, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, is that the format of a medium shapes the thinking it allows: print rewards patience and logic, a screen rewards speed and feeling. For Ibrahim, that wasn't an academic point. It explained, in his mind, why a shop built around slow browsing and unhurried recommendation still mattered in a city that had largely moved on to scrolling.
This wasn't really about nostalgia for paper. It was, for Ibrahim, about defending one of the last public spaces built around the kind of attention Postman worried we were losing: the slow, structured, undistracted kind that a screen actively works against. "We cannot go into retreat," he said. "We have to keep on doing our work, because what we do is important for the whole of society."
Worth the Detour
Tan Waln Ching described running an independent bookshop as being "like running a marathon," long, under-resourced, and sustained by not much more than the owners' own attachment to the work. Every owner I spoke to raised the same practical headaches: rent, whether anyone would turn up to an event, how to keep finding time to actually read enough to curate well. None of that disappeared for the three days of Indie Bookshop Day. What changed was that twenty shops that had spent years quietly building their own small, passionate communities showed up together, in a shophouse, a residential unit, above a food centre and online, to make the case that a bookshop's real value was never just the books on the shelf. It was the selection, the conversation, and the kind of attention it asked of its readers.