Shelf Awareness points to a story that confirms their suspicions as well as my own: parents, if they had their druthers, would leave their kids at the bookshop and let the books be their temporary nannies. That’s what some parents are doing in the Chinese city of Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang.
“We’re too busy to care for our son on workdays and had to leave him inside a bookstore. It’s a safe place for him to spend time on vacation,” a mother surnamed Yuan said to China Daily, which was meant by something far less than amusement on the bookstores’ part. “Of course we welcome the young readers but have to take the consequences of more books possibly being damaged during their reading,” a manager surnamed Liu said.