JAPAN’S hygiene-obsessed take on the humble second-hand bookshop will soon be arriving in London, with Britain’s first branch of Book-off due to open its doors this year.

The department-style store, which the company said would be “in the Regent Street and Piccadilly area”, will test whether British book-buyers are as easily converted to second-hand superstores as the Japanese have been.

The shops, designed with the finishings of high-end department stores and always found in prime city or suburban locations, are among Japan’s foremost retail phenomena of the past decade.

Once determined to buy only pristine new books, the Japanese quickly converted to the idea that if the shops were glitzy and the books were clean, they were happy to buy second-hand.

The British Book-off will mirror the format of the best of the Japanese stores — stocking every genre of fiction and non-fiction, and devoting large areas of the store to second-hand DVDs, CDs and video games. The British store will also stock manga — Japanese comics — tapping the growing popularity of this material among teenagers in the UK.

Customers sell their unwanted literature or software to the shop, which cleans the goods thoroughly before selling them on — always at a carefully calculated discount to their original high street price, ensuring that the company makes margins of 70 per cent on books and 50 per cent on electrical goods.

The company’s masterstroke has been to take the “shame” out of buying second-hand — something that the Japanese used to fear would make them look like cheapskates to friends and neighbours.

The sharp change of attitude means that Bookoff Corp now mounts a serious commercial challenge to Japan’s biggest booksellers and may do the same in London to the likes of Borders and Waterstone’s.

From the group’s original three outlets in 1991, Bookoff has expanded relentlessly and now has a domestic Japanese network of nearly 900 stores. That number is expected to almost double over the next six years.

The British opening, part of Bookoff’s wider European expansion, is the brainwave of Mayumi Hashimoto, one of the tiny handful of female chief executives running Japanese companies.

Ms Hashimoto’s swift rise, from part-time cashier to the presidency of Bookoff Corp, is itself a stark break with the stiff, seniority-based promotion system in place across most of corporate Japan.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, Ms Hashimoto said that the secret of the company’s success — and its likely appeal in the UK — is the skill with which books are priced before resale, and the respectability of the shops.

“Nobody really likes second-hand books when they smell, and the shops are just stacked with the books all over the place,” she says, “Bookoff makes the experience feel like a new bookshop but at discount prices.”

To show how close she remains to her shop-floor roots, Ms Hashimoto demonstrates the process of smartening the books up for resale: sanding the edges of the pages to make them perfectly white and cleaning the covers with a spray.

Bookoff, Ms Hashimoto says, is poised for huge sales expansion in the domestic market over the next few years. “From this year and in 2007, all the baby-boomers will retire,” she says. “The largest-ever generation of Japanese will be out of work, on a very fixed income, and with nothing to do.

“Buying second-hand books, reading them, selling them back to us and then buying more is going to be what they do. We used to have the comics on the ground floors to bring the youngsters in. Now we are putting them upstairs and making the ground floors attractive to old customers.”

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