Thursday 9 February 2012

Lost In The Amazon



Duncan writes...


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/09/amazon-publishing-bookshop-boycott-grows


I realise I have not done myself any favours. Like many, I have been seduced by the jungle, have browsed books in the early hours and bought them, to find them dropping seductively through my letterbox, only a day or so later. 


But now the UK landscape is selling only one battered volume: ‘Custer’s Last Stand.’ Waterstones (having already clipped their apostrophe) remain the last flag flying for that oasis of civilized behaviour, the bookshop, on an increasingly ruthless high street. Are we to surrender our volumes to this behemoth?


I bit the hand that fed me many a Saturday afternoon in Borders. The easy browsing with coffee and comfy chairs and a place to watch the world go by is, heartbreakingly, lost. 


‘What is the matter?’ ‘Between whom?’ ‘The matter you read, my lord.’ 


Get behind me, e-book, Kindle and any other.


Forever let it be folded corners and the finding of a postcard in years to come that marked the place we got to that rainy holiday. 


‘Dear reader, I will not marry him.’ 

1 comment:

  1. So true! We just gravitate to Amazon because it's so easy (and cheap!) without even thinking, and yet we have a lovely traditional style bookshop in Halifax. Fred Wade's is certainly a dying breed, and you have reminded me to make the effort to use it more :-)

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