The talk event "Thinking about Aomori Town #1 - Is a bookstore necessary in the town?" was held on March 24th at the AOMORI STARTUP CENTER on the 1st floor of the Aomori Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Shinmachi, Aomori City).

This talk event focuses on Aomori's urban development and specific themes, and features speakers from within and outside the prefecture. The event is sponsored by the voluntary organization &AOMORI. The theme of the first event was bookstores, and the event consisted of three parts, with Hideto Kamagaki, director of Bookstore Solutions Japan, as the main guest.

In the first part, Mr. Kamagaki talked about his experience in the book wholesale business and the current state of the publishing industry. According to Kamagaki, magazines, which began publishing in the late 1960s, served as a motivation for people to enter bookstores, but now a new motivation is needed. "The number of small, non-traditional bookstores is increasing, but large bookstores were born in the 1990s. We need to discuss the essence of whether bookstores, which serve as so-called knowledge repositories, can be replaced by Amazon and libraries." said Mr. Kamagaki.

The second part was a talk session titled ``About the ideal state of bookstores in Aomori,'' featuring Shinji Otokita, director of Hachinohe Book Center, and Takumi Nara, owner of Mawarimichi Bunko, a bookstore in Hirosaki. Hachinohe Book Center is a bookstore started by the government, and this year marks the 8th year since its opening.

Mr. Otokita points out holding events related to books as a way for bookstores to survive, and introduced the photo exhibition of a hip-hop photographer from Hachinohe that was held in 2018 (Heisei 30) as an example of Hachinohe Book Center's success. ``This was the first event to coincide with a photo book by a local photographer, and I had heard that it could not be held in Tokyo due to compliance reasons, so I organized it with the intention of being criticized. We were also able to hold a live event,” Otokita said.

In 2020, Nara opened a bookstore with a store area of ​​7 tsubo. Mr. Nara says that he would like to continue the event as long as it is an event where the purpose is to interact between customers and the store. He points out that this creates a cycle of

In the third part, we introduced answers to questions gathered in advance from the approximately 30 people who attended the event, as well as memories from the bookstore. Among them were participants who introduced the idea of ​​``ROUTE BOOKS,'' a bookstore that operates in a renovated abandoned building in Tokyo, and the efforts of ``Tsutaya Shoten,'' which sells things other than books. Hiroma Uematsu of &AOMORI, which organized the event, concluded, ``While we need to think about how a bookstore should function as a bookstore, we also need to think about it as an issue for the entire city, not just the store itself.''