Not dead yet

Independent Bookshop Week 2018 will take place 16 – 23 June. IBW is part of the Books Are My Bag campaign, and seeks to celebrate independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland.

The death of bookshops — and in particular independent bookshops — has been announced several times in the last few years, but it seems to have been a premature pronouncement. The steady decline in the UK has at last been arrested, and new independent bookshops have even been opening. It’s nothing to be complacent about, though, as indies can of course only survive if they get paying customers through the doors.

This trend has been matched by another development reported last month, the conclusion of a University of Arizona study being that millennials may prefer physical books over eBooks for reasons of “ownership, limiting usage experience, and value perceptions”. What this boils down to is this:

Readers have a constricted sense of ownership of digital books versus physical books; there are restrictions on sharing eBooks with friends, or gifting or selling the books, thus reducing their value.

Then there is the sense of being more emotionally attached to physical books, with physical books helping to establish a sense of self and belonging. This appears to be related to nostalgia for certain childhood books.

The sensory aspect of physical books is important: smell, feel, sight. Books collections are also used to express identity to visitors. While minimalists prefer digital books because they take up less physical space, many US participants in the study said eBooks felt more like renting than buying.

Significantly, many older readers prefer certain aspects of ebooks, for example e-readers are lightweight compared to physical books and enable the reader to zoom in on text.

For longtime fans of physical books little of this comes as a surprise. It just seems curious it has taken academics until recently to obtain the data that seems to confirm what many of us knew.

Of course this doesn’t guarantee that booklovers will get their stash from indies when they could get the same cheaper elsewhere — from bookshop chains or online, for example — so independents have to work hard to entice bibliophiles in, for example with cafés, book signings, book-related events, themed displays and the like.

Sadly, not all of us happen to live, as I do, just a hundred metres from the nearest indie. But if you do, please support it, especially during this year’s Independent Bookshop Week. You know the old adage: Use it or Lose it. And remember that INDY is also an acronym for I’m Not Dead Yet . . .

I’m Not Dead Yet. Strictly speaking, the phrase from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is “I’m not dead,” but in the musical Spamalot this gets transformed into “I am not dead yet…”

---

University of Arizona press release
https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/why-your-ebook-might-not-feel-yours
Academic abstract
Helm, S.V., Ligon, V., Stovall, T. et al. Electronic Markets (2018) 28: 177.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-018-0293-6

Independent Bookshop Week is not to be confused with Independent Bookstore Day in the US, “a one-day national party that takes place at indie bookstores across the country on the last Saturday in April” every year.

Advertisements

Literary influences

As some of you know, I don’t as a matter of principle get involved in blogging awards because, being a bit of a maverick, I’d much rather be composing an original post than feeling constrained by the questions that inevitably accompany these awards.

But a recent literature-based question posted by Ola on receiving a blogging award for the Re-enchantment of the World blog rather appealed to me and had me scurrying to my bookshelves. Here then is the question, followed by my answer — even if I have no intention of nominating anybody else as I’m invited to do by the rules of the award:

Name (and, if you wish, describe) up to 11 books which influenced you the most.

Spelling it out

Occasionally it’s nice to do a fun meme, right? Here’s one that grabbed my attention, courtesy of Lynne at Fictionophile via Paula at Book Jotter.

There are Rules — of course — for My Blog’s Name in Books:

1. Spell out your blog’s name (this is where you wish your blog’s name was shorter LOL).
2. Find a book from your TBR that begins with each letter. (Note you cannot ADD to your TBR to complete this challenge – the books must already be on your Goodreads TBR. )
3. Have fun!

I think I can stick to these — except I don’t have a Goodreads TBR list, the simple reason being that this list would include more than half my books!

(In case you’re wondering, a good proportion of those books are non-fiction or reference, and — yes — I’ve dipped into pretty much all of them. But back to the matter in hand… )

So perusing my shelves I’ve come up with a mixed selection of new-to-me and time-for-a-reread books spelling out CALMGROVE.

This is not a challenge

The City of Books, Aix-en-Provence

It really isn’t.

We’re now a third of the way through the year and I thought I would take stock of where I’ve travelled in the world of books. Turns out it’s not been too bad: fifteen books in around thirteen weeks, and all reviewed.

But it’s not a competition, so it turns out I’m in a win-win situation. As it’s not a contest of quantity it’s good to look at quality; and that quality will be gauged in terms of the range of authors and genres I’ve covered so far.

Home is where

Shelfie, Oxfam bookshop, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

“A House is Not a Home…” goes the song by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, and I think we can all agree with that. I’m sure that many of you have been in the position of having a few or even several abodes in your lifetime. Did all of them feel like home at the time?

What is it that makes a house a home? The lyrics of that song were clear: a house is not a home “when there’s no one there to hold you tight.” This is corroborated by the common saying that home is where the heart is, implying that this is where loved ones still live or even where one’s fondest memories reside. I think it’s impossible to underestimate the emotional pull that ‘home’ has over a mere dwelling place — think of a building and its associations are bound up with its actuality.

I’m occasionally asked where home is for me, and my stock response has usually been it’s here, where we live now. Certainly the four different properties we’ve lived in as owner-occupiers — where we raised a family, or worked from, or retired to — felt like, or still feels like, home at the time we were/are there.

But increasingly I find it’s not as complete an answer as I’ve glibly trotted out.

Fellow travellers

Ideogram of lift or, if you prefer, elevator. Looks like a man has, again, assumed it’s his job to control things …

My relationship with books is a bit like that one has with passengers in a slow-moving lift, a relationship which is perfectly illustrated by a visit to my bedside table. Here, alongside reading glasses and case, watch, alarm clock, notebook and pen sit a couple of piles of books. (We won’t talk, just now, of the ones that sit out of sight in the top drawer.) I’m a rather faithless reader, picking up books that take my fancy, sometimes sticking with one for the duration but mostly flitting from one to another. I like to pretend that I do this because different titles advantageously inform each other; but it may simply be that I have a goldfish brain, unable to sustain a thought for long.

Wales Readathon announcement

Many of you will know that I reside in Wales, and have done so for well over a dozen years — fourteen in fact. My association with this small country goes back a lot further than that, however. In fact, some more of you will know that I was involved with an archaeological excavation on a Welsh Dark Age site for nigh on three decades, from initial investigation to final report; and that I’ve been researching what is arguably Wales’ premier figure of legend, King Arthur, for more than half a century, along with some of the associated literature and folklore.

Although not born and bred Welsh, then, I feel a great affinity with this part of the world. So I was quite excited to find that fellow blogger Paula Bardell-Hedley from North Wales was planning, under the hashtag #dewithon19, a Wales Readathon for March 2019. As she explains, “The people of Wales celebrate St David’s Day annually on 1st March – the date of our patron saint’s death in 589 CE. In honour of this traditional anniversary, and also in recognition of the time of year when daffodils (the national flower of Wales) explode into bloom, we will hold the very first Dewithon – Dewi being the diminutive form of the Welsh name Dafydd (David).”

What does this Readathon involve?