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hermionejg: fishingboatproceeds: I’m concerned about the future of books and bookstores, but I’m even more concerned about the 14,000 people who lost their jobs in the liquidation of Borders. Thomas Jefferson said he couldn’t live without books, but we really can’t live without jobs. (And look, I’m a capitalist: I understand that an efficient economy creates jobs where they’re needed and removes them where they aren’t. I get that we can’t pay people to do work that doesn’t add value. But I think bookstores do add value, and I hope to convince lots of other people that I’m right. That’s something Hank and I are thinking about a lot as we plan for The Fault in Our Stars tour. We want to find ways to reward bookstores for all the value they bring to our lives, while still embracing the truth that the Internet is a great place to find and buy books.) This picture genuinely makes me want to cry. Not because I liked Borders (I didn’t) but because I like books and I like booksellers (not me, although I think I’m pretty good at my job, if only because I’ve had the great joy of seeing the flash in kids’ eyes when they go from not wanting to read a thing for years to hearing about a book and needing to read it immediately). Like John, “I think bookstores do add value, and I hope to convince lots of other people that I’m right”. I also think we’re going to be facing more and more problems with literacy in the future as we experience texts in different ways. That’s not to say boo hiss ebook or boo hiss reading on screens but it’s about having the time and making the time to read without distractions in an immersive and critical way that will become harder and harder as (I predict) originally simple and effective e-readers add more bells and whistles.  Today I tweeted that it was great to be told by a customer that they saw a book on Amazon but wanted to come to the bookshop to check if we had it first. “The death of the British high street” is a phrase often tossed around but as more and more shops become empty and unused spaces, we’ve got to stop ignoring what we’re losing. A few rambly (and annoyingly, probably a bit preachy) points: Yes, god, of course I’m biased. I’m horribly biased. I’m up myself enough to think that my advice and that of my colleagues and that of the florist or the grocer or the hardware shop man or even the employees in the chain shops is important and valuable. I feel like slowly we’re becoming more afraid of talking to people — god knows I prefer the self-serve machines at Tesco, M&S, Boots, Sainsbury’s etc. Maybe there’s something a bit self-righteous about this? Like we feel we know what we’re looking for, especially with online reviews and recommendations, so we don’t want to be bothered and/or we’re increasingly anxious. Ultimately, though, I think an environment in which we don’t talk to one another regardless of how much we are talking online is extremely unhealthy. But that may just be me. I also feel like it’s far too easy to throw out “it’s too expensive to do otherwise” as a reason for shopping online. By handing over money for an item we’re saying “I hope/believe this copy of All of my Friends are Superheroes is worth 1.63 hours’ pay and I think I will enjoy it more than spending those 1.63 hours of pay on eight lottery tickets” (or whatever you’d spend £7.99 on. Some of you might say that you wouldn’t spend that £7.99 in anything, but I doubt that’s true — along the way somewhere, you’d spend that on something). The retort might be, by spending £7.99 on three books via that website named after a massive river, I am saying that I value reading and am doing what I can to continue reading despite the hard economic times. That’s a fair point and as a student in colossal amounts of debt, I understand that, but looking forwards I’d personally rather buy my books in a bookshop to support that bookshop and bookshops in general so that when I do want to stroll in somewhere and buy a book straight away, it isn’t Tesco. So that I have a choice of more than 20 bestsellers, half of which are biographies by celebrities I don’t give a shit about. So that if I can’t find something I want to read I can go up to a bookseller, explain the last few books I’ve read and be given a book that makes a lightbulb flash above my head. Basically, I think specialists are important, I think literacy is important, I think experience is important, I think bookshops are important. What do you think? Just Rosi being brilliant.  Again.
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