There is something rather lovely about being able to buy a novel at two in the morning. You could be coming off a late shift. You could have finished a particularly good book and need another. You could simply have gone out for milk and suffered a small literary diversion.

In Hiroshima, Futaba Tosho is making room for that last possibility. Its TSUTAYA MEGA Nakasuji store now lists its book and stationery departments as open around the clock, with nobody staffing those areas between 9pm and 10am. The company’s Kabe Centre branch is due to follow on 8 October.

The books stay up. The booksellers get to go home. For once, a publishing innovation appears to have remembered that people need sleep.

A late-night browse, with a small technological introduction

This is a combination of staffed daytime trading and unstaffed overnight access, using Nippan’s Hontasu system. Futaba’s announcement describes facial-recognition entry, self-checkouts, security cameras and remote support, with emergency arrangements. It is extending access to the book and stationery sections, not promising that every counter in the building will serve you at midnight.

So the romantic picture of slipping anonymously into a quiet bookshop needs a small adjustment. The door would like to recognise your face first. You came for a paperback; there is an introduction to make.

That may feel convenient to one reader and a bit much to another. How registration works, what information is retained and what happens when something goes wrong are reasonable questions for a customer to bring along. The retailer’s assurance of a safe experience is its own assurance, rather than an independent assessment of the system.

The books stay up. The booksellers get to go home.

Sometimes the competition is a locked door

Futaba frames the move as a way to fit book buying around people’s lives, against a background of staffing shortages and rising operating costs. It has an obvious commercial interest in that argument. It is also an easy argument to understand if your free time tends to begin shortly after the shops have shut.

Online shopping has never required us to finish work at a sensible hour. Physical browsing usually does. Keeping the shelves accessible offers something different from another evening of looking at book covers on a phone: a chance to pick one up, turn it over, read a page and get distracted by the entirely unrelated book beside it.

That last part is worth preserving. A bookshop is one of the few places where failing to stick to the shopping list can feel like intellectual development.

Of course, a self-checkout cannot have the conversation that begins, “I can’t remember the title, but the cover was blue.” A good bookseller might actually get somewhere with that. There is a difference between making the stock available and helping someone discover what they want. This arrangement keeps the human service during staffed hours; it doesn’t make the two experiences identical.

The lights are on. The verdict can wait.

There is now more than a launch date to go on at MEGA Nakasuji: its current store page explicitly advertises 24-hour book and stationery sales. Kabe Centre’s page still gives 8 October as the changeover date. Neither tells us yet whether overnight shoppers will buy enough to make the arrangement worthwhile.

For authors and publishers, extra browsing hours could mean another opportunity for a book to meet its reader. Could is doing some useful work there. These pages do not establish a sales uplift, a saving or a reduction in jobs. There is no need to declare either the salvation of bookselling or the end of the bookseller before anyone has counted the receipts.

For now, it is a pleasingly concrete experiment: let people browse later without keeping the whole daytime operation awake. If it works, the reward may be something as ordinary as a tired person finding a good book on the way home.

And perhaps a notebook. At two in the morning, a new notebook can still look like a complete plan for sorting your life out.