Bookstores

Bookstores are magnets. (I realize now that the statement makes me the metal!) I gravitate towards them. I enter without planning to buy anything, but I almost end up getting something home. Unlike other people, but perhaps most people I know, I read whatever I fancy. No planned reading list, no check lists to tick off. 

Nathan Heller's profile on James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones, is just fascinating! Daunt commutes on a train, rides a bicycle, and drives an electric vehicle that needs washing. 

One morning, he met me at the end of the Darsham station’s platform with his car, an electric Polestar that was dark navy and caked in dust. “The filthiest car in Britain!” he announced and put the vehicle in gear. 

Why physical bookstores exist in the age of the Kindle and LCD screens is a mystery. The profile clarifies why bookstores remain. 

The tenor of alarm about new technologies was familiar. When Daunt arrived at Waterstones, bookselling was in a panic about the Kindle, said to be poised to replace paper books. Daunt was doubtful: he’d used the product. And he’d seen the advent of the personal computer during his time as a banker, when the arrival of the I.B.M. XT had carried him and his peers up the ranks. But books were more like rubber bands or bottle openers than like computers: their form was largely unimprovable for their function.

I like my Kindle. I like my printed books. I buy ebooks and actual, physical books made of ink and paper. 

I grew up in a small town with a small bookstore called People's at the Notre Dame Complex. Not a bookstore, actually, but a school supplies store with a two shelves of books. Hardly anything was "literary fiction." But the store introduced me to the works of John Grisham, Sidney Sheldon, and Twisted by Jessica Zafra. 

I don't know if there are bookstores in Marbel, or even in General Santos, other than National Bookstore. Might I suggest that someone put up a bookstore in these cities? 

Daunt holds that a literary culture is something booksellers are well placed to build. “Books aren’t a fixed market,” he told me in his office. “The more bookshops there are, the more people will read. The better bookshops are, the more people discover things. Online is an efficient place, but it’s not a place that can excite in itself.”  

We lament that not a lot of people read these days, that we live in a post-literate age. I'm not sure. We can perhaps start with building, patronizing, and supporting bookstores and writers.