A number of independent bookstores in London are dropping Wi-Fi and coffee in order to focus on books and books alone.
The New York Times has identified a handful of these bookstores which includes: Tenderbooks, Libreria Books, and Word on the Water. The ideas is to create havens from digital devices and to focus on reading and “human curation.” Here is more from The Times:
“If someone gets a phone call, they leave the shop. It’s the same with the internet—people just know this isn’t the space for being online,” said Tamsin Clark, owner of Tenderbooks, which opened in 2014 in Covent Garden, a lively neighborhood packed with theaters and rare-book shops. “The thing about books is that they’re more interesting than the internet—we assume that everyone who comes here believes that.”