Indigo Books & Music Inc., known as "Indigo" and stylized "!ndigo", is Canada's only major English-language bookstore chain. It is Canada's largest book, gift, and specialty toy retailer, operating stores in all ten provinces and one territory, and through a website offering a selection of books, toys, home décor, stationery, and gifts. Most Chapters and Indigo stores include a Starbucks café inside. As of 2022, Indigo has started selling music, and select audio equipment.
Borders Group, Inc. was an American multinational book and music retailer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. In its final year, the company employed about 19,500 people throughout the U.S., primarily in its Borders and Waldenbooks stores.
WH Smith PLC, trading as WHSmith, is a British retailer, with headquarters in Swindon, England, which operates a chain of high street, railway station, airport, port, hospital and motorway service station shops selling books, stationery, magazines, newspapers, entertainment products and confectionery.
Barnes & Noble Booksellers is an American bookseller. It is a Fortune 1000 company and the bookseller with the largest number of retail outlets in the United States. As of October 2023, the company operates 592 retail stores across all 50 U.S. states.
Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores in Portland, Oregon, and its surrounding metropolitan area. Powell's headquarters, dubbed Powell's City of Books, claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's City of Books is located in the Pearl District on the edge of downtown and occupies a full city block between NW 10th and 11th Avenues and between W. Burnside and NW Couch Streets. It contains over 68,000 square feet, about 1.6 acres of retail floor space.
Blockbuster Video was an American video rental store chain. It was founded by David Cook in 1985 as a stand-alone mom-and-pop home video rental shop, but later grew into a national store chain featuring video game rentals, DVD-by-mail, streaming, video on demand, and cinema theater. The company expanded internationally throughout the 1990s. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster employed 84,300 people worldwide and operated 9,094 stores.
Waldenbooks, operated by the Walden Book Company, Inc., was an American shopping mall-based bookstore chain, from 1995 as a subsidiary of Borders Group. The chain also ran a video game and software chain under the name Waldensoftware, as well as a children's educational toy chain under Walden Kids. In 2011, the chain was liquidated in bankruptcy.
Books-A-Million, Inc. is a bookstore chain in the United States, operating 260 stores in 32 states. Stores range in size from 4,000 to 30,000 square feet and sell books, magazines, manga, collectibles, toys, technology, and gifts. Most Books-A-Million stores feature "Joe Muggs" cafés, a coffee and espresso bar. Stores operate under the names Books-A-Million, Bookland, Books & Company, and 2nd & Charles.
Books Kinokuniya is a Japanese bookstore chain operated by Kinokuniya Company Ltd., founded in 1927, with its first store located in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan. Its name translates to "Bookstore of Kii Province". The company has its headquarters in Meguro, Tokyo.
Digital comics are comics released digitally, as opposed to in print. Digital comics commonly take the form of mobile comics. Webcomics may also fall under the "digital comics" umbrella.
Dymocks Booksellers is an Australian-founded privately owned bookstore chain, that also specialise in CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, e-books and related merchandising. As of June 2022, the chain has about 50 stores in Australia.
Brentano's was an American bookstore chain with numerous locations in the United States.
B. Dalton Bookseller was an American retail bookstore chain founded in 1966 by Bruce Dayton, a member of the same family that operated the Dayton's department store chain. B. Dalton expanded to become the largest retailer of hardcover books in the United States, with 779 stores at the peak of the chain's success. Located mainly at indoor shopping malls, B. Dalton competed primarily with Waldenbooks. Barnes & Noble acquired the chain from Dayton's in 1987 and continued to operate it until a late 2009 announcement that the last 50 stores would be liquidated by January 2010. B. Dalton was later revived by rebranding a Barnes & Noble location in 2022.
Amazon Books was a chain of retail bookstores owned by online retailer Amazon. The first store opened on November 2, 2015, in Seattle, Washington. On March 2, 2022, it was reported that all Amazon Books would close on various dates in the future.
Mitsuwa Marketplace is a Japanese supermarket chain in America, with locations in California, Illinois, Texas, Hawaii, and New Jersey.
National Book Store, Inc. is a retail company based in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, Philippines. It operates a bookstore and office-supplies store chain of the same name. It is the largest bookstore chain in the Philippines with over 230 branches nationwide.
Book store shoplifting is a problem for book sellers and has sometimes led stores to keep certain volumes behind store counters.
Thalia is a chain of more than 200 book shops in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
A doujin shop is a store that specializes in doujinshi, self-published works. They exist mainly in Japan. Doujin shops can be both brick and mortar as well as online stores. Some sell only second-hand doujinshi, but particularly larger chain stores also sell new doujinshi. Many doujin shops also handle other kinds of doujin works, such as doujin music or doujin games, or commercially published popular media such as manga and anime.
Google Play Books, formerly Google eBooks, is an ebook digital distribution service operated by Google, part of its Google Play product line. Users can purchase and download ebooks and audiobooks from Google Play, which offers over five million titles, with Google claiming it to be the "largest ebooks collection in the world". Books can be read on a dedicated Books section on the Google Play website, through the use of a mobile app available for Android and iOS, through the use of select e-readers that offer support for Adobe Digital Editions, through a web browser and reading via Google Home. Users may also upload up to 2,000 ebooks in the PDF or EPUB file formats. Google Play Books is available in 75 countries.
