Monday, April 20, 2015

Know Your Enemy

"For all the ease and convenience of online shopping or the digital download, I still feel a town without a bookshop is missing something … For much of the early nineties I worked in bookshops myself, running the children’s section in Waterstones Notting Hill with a rod of iron and believing, like all booksellers, that books are somehow special, that the expertise and enthusiasm of booksellers is vital, that if you love bookshops you should spend money there, and that to discover a book on display in a well-staffed, lovingly-maintained shop, to hold it in your hand then to sneak off and buy the same book online is really just a genteel form of shoplifting."

Author and former bookseller David Nicholls defends bookshops and denounces showrooming in a keynote speech delivered at last week's London Book Fair.

(Thanks to Joe for the link.)

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