World's Biggest Bookstore

When it first opened in 1980, it really was the biggest bookstore in the world. Even with competition from all the Indigo and Chapters locations in the city, it's still the best-stocked of the big-box stores. Even better, it has no mood lighting or in-store café, and a minimum of gift items on sale.

Chapters/Indigo/Coles stores are largely owned by Heather Reisman and her husband Gerry Schwartz, who bought out and consolidated separate chains or stores into one brand. Apart from stocking an almost uniformly bland, meagre selection of literary books, the large box stores mostly serve as a vehicle for 1) Starbucks franchises and 2) often useless, typically overpriced home decoration products imported from poorer countries and upsold as chic must-haves for people with upwardly mobile incomes and corresponding taste. Even the books most often on display seem to be an extension of the Western ideal of domesticity. More troubling is the fact the CEO and hubby contribute large sums to the Israeli Defense Forces or related organizations because they are proud supporters. If you can live with all of this - as most Torontonians do - the views from Festival Hall and the Eaton Centre stores are among the best in downtown Toronto (from a bookstore.) Festival Hall, in particular, has two advantages: it is right under and beside a multiplex (which I'm no great fan of, but at least it's something that shows movies) and the store has massive floor-to-ceiling windows that run along one entire side of the store. They offer an excellent view of both the skyline and the busy, restaurant-packed street below. Their website competes well on many fronts with Amazon, lowering prices for Canadians - who usually pay much more for the same product than their Southern neighbours. Sometimes they simply have a book, new, when you need it, as opposed to waiting forever for an online book that may never come in despite being "In Stock" at Amazon or some other site. And their occasional sales - generally near the end of the year - coupled with their exploitative membership program - can make new books much more affordable (if you are a frequent buyer.) The gewgaws also inevitably end up on clearance and make perfectly inane gifts for those perfectly inane occasions. Finally, the World's Biggest Bookstore (which isn't really that big) - the most 'independent' of the three due to its long history and some of its dependable faces - saves the face of the entire chain, thanks to a far more comprehensive selection that is closer to what is expected of a big-box bookstore. It's also less upscale and less stuffed with kitsch, however, and perhaps survives for that reason.