June 29, 2004
W. H. Sainsbury's?
The experience of going to a bookshop has become less of an intellectual pleasure to me. I had this thought while browsing the shelves at Heathrow Airport while waiting for my connecting flight to Düsseldorf. W.H.Smith looks more like a supermarket than a bookshop to me. The "3 for 18£" yellow signs , the painfully colourful book covers, the lame book titles; it all made me feel like the target of a marketing campaign for a new dish washing liquid.
Unfortunately they are marketing what I call "fast-reading literature". Don't get me wrong: I like a book cover with a great graphic design; I probably will pick up a book with an esthetically appealing cover before any other.
Writers these days act like sellers of entertainment rather than artists/thinkers: they write for a target audience rather than write what they feel and then see how many are interested...
There's an awful "pink"/"light"/"pop" literature portuguese writer that proudly states that she got portuguese people into reading and that she can live off her writing which is something many "serious" other authors haven't managed to do. Silly woman. Writing (good writing, at least) is an art. The book industry left the Culture(hard to define Culture with a capital C, but...) sphere and has turned into a branch of a mindless entertainment industry; and mindless entertainment hardly ever increase's a whole nation's intellectual capacity even if it improves their reading habits.
Published by claudia | TrackBackBooks? Ooh they're so yesterday! ;) Just download ebook of your choice onto your PDA and you won't need to lug a bound tome about with you everywhere.
It does make you look about rather sheepishly during takeoff and landing with nothing to do though, since electronic equipment is supposed to be switched off!
Posted by: alkam on July 2, 2004 08:42 AMDon't buy books, steal them.
Posted by: Karl Marx on July 1, 2004 09:19 AMI suppose airport bookshops aren't the best example...they're filled with light reading books to get most people through their flights :-)
I use amazon a lot too but I love to browse bookshelves. Especially if it's an old books shop. I love the smell of old paper!
Posted by: claudia on June 30, 2004 04:55 PMBooks are just another commodity more in the market.
I was in Heathrow a month connecting to San Francisco (God bless BA and their extra cabin space, I'm a tall guy) and I felt quite disgusted at the bookstores over there.
It seems there's more class invested in buying Scotch (de facto present for my father) in that airport than buying and getting yourself cozy with a good book...(as there's nowhere to sit down in the main area except for restaurants and cafeterias)
So it goes...
Regards from Taipei... (your blog is still truly a gem)
Posted by: Zabriskie on June 30, 2004 03:57 AMit's all marketing these days. the ny times just ran a piece on distinctive reading habits in new york's various neighborhoods. evidently the large chain bookstores keep statistics on such things, and we help confirm certain demographic stereotypes if we buy, say, William Burroughs at a location in a "bohemian" neighborhood, or a volume on etiquette at a more "bourgeois" locale. haha. and they stock the shelves accordingly, of course.
anyway i must say i rarely buy anything at bookstores these days. amazon has long been my bookseller of choice, and with their network of used booksellers growing ever wider, one can buy second-hand books there too, usually for a tiny fraction of their sticker price. the danger here is that my book budget goes 3 or 4 times farther than it used to, which has my to-read pile resembling a skyscraper.
Posted by: carlos on June 29, 2004 10:37 PM