Wi-Fi shunned by indie bookstores in London combatting online distractions

The battle to snag the precious attention of consumers swimming in a sea of ubiquitous Wi-Fi is being waged on a new front in London: bookstores.

Independent bricks and mortar bookstores in London like Libreria Books, Tenderbooks, Word on the Water, Buchhandlung Walther König and Lutyens & Rubinstein are all shunning the practice of offering Wi-Fi to customers, according to a report in the New York Times.

The practice, which has become popular at many bookstores in recent years, took hold as places like Starbucks and Barnes & Noble began allowing customers to read, drink java and even browse the internet, all in a bid to stoke interest in those store's offline inventory.

Now, years after the practice has become normalized in the U.S. and UK, some bookstores, still feeling the pinch of online bookstores like Amazon, are ditching the experiment. Offering Wi-Fi is viewed as particularly problematic by some book retailers due to the practice of showrooming by many customers. Showrooming is the act of act of going into a brick and mortar store to examine a product (in this case, a book) in person, but then purchasing the product online instead of in the store, usually to snag a better deal.

Eliminating Wi-Fi also forces customers to interact with bookstore staff for information and recommendations, instead of firing up their GoodReads app.

"We're celebrating human curation over algorithmic rhythms," Libreria Books' Rohan Silva told the Times.

The move to push bookstore customers back into the old days, when a bookstore was like a quiet library in which most people weren’t there to socialize and browse online, but to do serious book shopping, might seem like an anachronism.

However, now that Amazon has begun rolling out its own brick and mortar bookstores, it's clear that independent bookstores will need to resort to even more drastic measures to compete with the online book behemoth.

This new stance on Wi-Fi by some indie bookstores may seem extreme to some, but in the long run, it just might save what little consumer attention is left when potential book buyers step through their doors.