Employees pack books at the Disanji bookstore, which is now closed. [Wang Jing]

Disanji, the largest private bookstore in Beijing, closed at 6 pm yesterday for the last time after losing almost 50 million yuan in its three years in business.

Customers were lining up in front of cashiers before the end with armfuls of books, a scene that observers said was sadly an unusual one.

Most of the customers said they had unused credit on their book cards and wanted to use them before it was too late. Some used trolleys to cart away their last-minute purchases.

The bookstore opened in July 2006 with a floor space of almost 20,000 sq m and more than 300,000 different titles.

While customers were told they will be able to use their book card credits when the store reopens, a man, surnamed Liu, said he fears that day may never come.

Liu said the closure was a shame because it will compromise the intellectual atmosphere around the Zhongguancun area.

Another group of people pushing trolleys on the last day of business were the representatives of various publishing houses to which Disanji owes money.

Disanji owed the Commercial Press 260,000 yuan, according to a source with another publishing house. The Commercial Press refused to confirm the amount.

Large quantities of books were removed from the shelves and carted off to vans parked outside.

Police were deployed in the bookstore, even though the scene was largely an orderly one.

A retired worker, surnamed Wang, said he had frequented Disanji since it opened in 2006. Reading, but not buying, he said he preferred Disanji because of its "rich collection of historical books". He said it was "too early" for Disanji to shut.

When asked what bookstore he will turn to, he said it will probably be the Zhongguancun Bookstore.

Competition from the latter was widely believed to have been the main reason for Disanji's collapse.

After the grand opening in 2006, Disanji was engaged in multiple price wars with its neighbor, a branch of the State-owned Xinhua Bookstore network.

Discount at one point reached 30 percent for all books sold in Disanji. It won in popularity but was severely hurt economically. In September 2009, it moved out of the modern building named after itself and into a basement in Haidian Book City and the space it occupied shrank by 75 percent.

All employees rejected calls for interviews and the bookstore authority could not be reached for the moment.