Disney Fans Have Figured Out What Disney Springs Is Missing, and the Idea Is Genius

Try to think of one place at Disney Springs where you can sit for an hour without buying something.

Go ahead and count. There are benches along the water, and they are usually full. There is the occasional low wall. If you want to actually sit down in air conditioning for any meaningful stretch of time, you are buying a meal, a drink, a bowling lane, or a movie ticket.

That is not an accident. Disney Springs is a retail and dining district, and it excels at it. More than 150 shops and restaurants, live music, a rooftop bar at the Coca-Cola Store, and some of the best table service food on Walt Disney World property. It works.

But it is relentless. On a busy Saturday in December, Disney Springs is wall-to-wall people moving between transactions, and there is nowhere inside that district designed for a person to simply exist quietly for a while. Every square foot is either selling you something or feeding you something.

Which brings us to an idea that has been circulating among Disney fans, and which turns out to have a much stronger case behind it than a wishlist post normally does.

Disney Springs needs a bookstore.

Where This Started

A Threads user put it plainly.

“Disney Springs needs a bookstore… there I said it,” wrote user stephintothemagic.

The replies did not argue. They mostly volunteered space, themes, and staffing.

“I honestly would never leave and I think that’s why they haven’t put one in,” wrote user houseofhall92.

“Yesssss can I curate it????” wrote user lcannady.

But buried in that thread were two facts that change this from a fantasy into a genuinely reasonable ask.

View on Threads

Disney Springs Has Had Bookstores Before. Twice.

This is the detail that makes the whole argument.

“It used to have one back when it was the Disney village,” wrote user ukdisneymagic. “Readin’ and Writin’. I used to pretty much live in there as a teenager… as a bookish teen from the UK it was amazing coming to the US to stock up on Judy Blume and LM Montgomery books that weren’t available over here.”

And then there was the second one, which a lot of people remember.

“The Virgin Megastore (where Splitsville is at now) was awesome,” wrote user analogparks. “The second floor was a giant bookstore.”

Virgin Megastore was the British entertainment retail chain Richard Branson founded in 1976, which expanded to hundreds of locations worldwide through the 1990s before closing its North American stores. Its Disney Springs location included a full bookstore upstairs. That space is now a bowling alley.

A former employee weighed in on the numbers.

“As someone who worked at Virgin, in the books, it was popular enough 15 years ago,” wrote user magduhlin. “But now…it’d be pretty great idea.”

Another commenter pointed to a third example.

“There used to be one. it was across from the Christmas store,” wrote user andrea.ever.after. “The Art of Disney would get in all the Disney historian books, rare books to find. One side was primarily books, stationery, and such. and the other side was the art.”

So this is not a question of whether a bookstore can work at Disney Springs. It worked, repeatedly, and then it was removed.

Disney Already Owns the Inventory

Here is the part that makes the business case easy.

Disney does not need a retail partner for this. The company owns Disney Publishing Worldwide and Hyperion, publishes Marvel and Star Wars titles, produces National Geographic books, and puts out Disney Editions art and history volumes that fans actively hunt for.

Commenters caught that immediately.

“Disney has their own publishing imprint, I’ve been saying for years that they should have a bookstore somewhere,” wrote user ophelia_helianthus.

“Even if they carried books from Disney publishing there would be a lot to choose from,” wrote user bookishworkingmom.

“Disney must have hundreds of thousands of publications from their IP’s alone,” wrote user jjmfilm, who also suggested daily character readings for kids.

A store stocked entirely from Disney’s own catalog would still be a legitimate bookstore.

Everyone Landed on the Same Theme

Independently, over and over, people arrived at Belle.

“I love the idea and the idea of Beast’s/Belle’s library as the theme,” wrote user megansmagicaladventures.

“And make it Belle themed,” wrote user erwinj.official.

“They need a gigantic library like in beauty and the beast,” wrote user walkintheparktravel.

That consensus is not surprising. The library scene in Beauty and the Beast is one of the most recognizable images Disney has ever produced, specifically an image of a quiet room full of books that someone gets to disappear into. It is already the exact fantasy people are describing.

One commenter predicted the execution precisely.

“They can call it Belle’s, put in a coffee shop & charge $21 for a coffee,” wrote user lindsayinchicago.

The Space Problem Is Not Actually a Problem Right Now

Commenters had candidates ready.

“Now that Wolfgang Pucks is shuttering, we should petition Disney with this idea,” wrote user megansmagicaladventures.

Wolfgang Puck Bar and Grill served its final meal earlier this month, so that is a genuine, current vacancy in a prime location.

“Super dry is always empty and would make an amazing bookstore,” wrote user magicaldoot.

Whether those specific spaces are right or not, the broader point holds. Disney Springs is not fully occupied and permanently fixed. Tenants rotate constantly.

The Honest Counterarguments

Two objections in that thread deserve to be taken seriously, because they identify a real contradiction in the idea.

“No because people going in there just for the aesthetic and to make content would ruin it for those of us that enjoy a quiet experience and reading,” wrote user nadjag__.

“Oh, yes because people love fighting their way through throngs of humans and screaming children in a bookstore,” wrote user kpton.

Both are fair. A beautifully themed Belle’s library at Disney Springs would become one of the most photographed interiors on property within a week, and a bookstore in the busiest shopping district at Walt Disney World in late December is not going to be a peaceful place.

There is also a broader complaint worth noting.

“They’ve removed SO much whimsy from Disney Springs to make it more of a bougie outdoor mall you could find in a lot of places,” wrote user djrusso_author, who specifically missed when the Candy Cauldron had an actual bubbling cauldron on its sign.

That is the underlying frustration driving all of this. The bookstore request is really a request for character.

Why It Would Still Work

Here is what a bookstore does that almost no other retail format does.

Browsing is the product. A bookstore is one of the only stores where a person standing around for forty minutes, not buying anything, is behaving exactly as intended. That is the business model, not a failure of it.

Disney Springs currently has nothing that operates on that principle. Every other space wants you to transact and move along so the next person can sit down.

Add a bookstore with real seating, a few corners to disappear into, and a cafe next door, which commenters asked for repeatedly, and Disney Springs gains the one thing it does not currently have anywhere in the district. Somewhere to stop.

Disney has not announced anything remotely like this, and there is no indication it is being considered.

But the space exists, the inventory exists, the theme writes itself, and it has worked there twice before.

Source: Threads discussion beginning with a post by user stephintothemagic.