The Murakami Offensive: Is This How Bookstores Beat Amazon?

In a bid to outmaneuver Amazon, Kinokuniya, Japan’s largest bookstore chain, recently bought 90% of the first print run of Haruki Murakami’s new book Novelist as a Vocation, a collection of essays the author wrote for Monkey, a Japanese literary magazine. The book arrives in stores on September 10.

Kinokuniya’s plan is to corner the market against “the everything store,” which will be left with only 5,000 copies of the collection.