When faced with a nefarious cookie thief, what do you do? You try to nab the thief.

What if the thief has trained in a secret ninja school? Then you secure your house.

I might be pushing this terrible analogy too far—but from what I’ve gleaned from publishers, it seems that we are, paradoxically, throwing our doors wide open and teaching our dog to welcome said cookie thief.

In other words: our economic policies encourage the sort of barely legal market-loophole exploitation in which Amazon engages, to the detriment of our local bookstores.

From our Economics 101 classes, we all know that protectionism is bad. Just look at how the tariffs that the United States and China are lobbing at each other have depressed the international economy. On the other hand, free trade is good. It encourages competition, which in turn increases efficiency and lowers prices; the market, as a whole, benefits.

And where else is free trade more venerated, to an almost cult-like status, than export-oriented Singapore? Consumer goods from all over the world constantly flow in and out through our borders.

But some books we find on the shelves of bookstores, according to Edmund, “have no right to be sold here”.

“Books have territorial rights. If I publish an author, I have the Singapore or world right. In the case of America, most of them only have US right, so the book cannot be sold in Singapore. But because Singapore signed a free trade agreement, we have an open market, and anybody can bring in anything here.”

So you know how, in Kinokuniya , you’re sometimes confronted by two equally alluring but different covers of the same book? That’s because one is usually the US edition (e.g. published by Simon & Schuster) and the other the UK edition (e.g. Penguin). These migrant books are known as parallel imports or grey products because of their murky copyright and intellectual property statuses in international markets.

Edmund elaborates: “Technically, if they want to sell their book, they have to look for a Singapore publisher. They have to come to me and say, ‘Can you publish my book for Singapore?’”

But because of our FTA and open market, parallel imports are allowed. Local publishers are thus deprived of an enormous source of potential business. This has a knock-on effect on bookstores, because their profit margins on parallel imports are typically lower than books that are published locally, which partly explains why it’s becoming more difficult to survive as a bookstore in Singapore.