My local town doesn’t have an independent bookshop. My
local town doesn’t have any kind of
bookshop. Outside of the supermarkets (and we have lots of them), the only shop you can buy books in is a very small
branch of WH Smith. Anything bigger and I’d have to drive to Crewe or Chester, or venture further afield to Liverpool or Manchester.
So I’m shopping today on the High Street. We have Rymans
and Boots and Costa – even Marks & Spencer. But no book shop. I decide to
have a wander around WH Smith just to have a look at what’s on the shelves
these days.
Best-sellers – Sylvia Day and EL James. Fifty shades of
erotica and more. Gillian Flynn’s Gone
Girl (I hated that book) in several different incarnations. Scandinavian
crime and lots of romance and women’s fiction. I move towards the back of the shop,
falling into old habits of hunting out the science fiction and fantasy. There
used to be lots of it – now we’re down to a couple of shelves and if you don’t
like Stephen King or Robert Jordan’s 300 books of the Wheel of Time or Terry Pratchett, then you might as well move
along. Where are all the mid-list authors? The up-and-coming authors I used to
meet at conventions? How are they ever going to sell if nobody buys their
books? How is anybody going to buy their books if they don’t know they even exist?
I don’t have a dog in the Amazon v Hachette fight. I don’t
want to see Amazon take over the world either. I’m happy reading paperbacks or
ebooks, from both traditional and self-published authors – I don’t care; if the
story is good, I’ll read it. But who dictates what books are on the shelves of
WH Smith? The big publishers can offer the best discounts, pay for
front-of-store promotions for their star authors, while the rest languish in
obscurity. I don’t want to be offered a selection of what the people with the
most money think I should be reading or buying. Why isn’t it about art anymore?
At least Amazon offers me a (relatively) unbiased
selection of books by all authors. Yes, I have to sift through rubbish. Yes, I
have to filter through whatever Amazon decides to show me first. I’m sure the
big publishers pay for virtual shelf-space here too. But at least I can get
beyond that and find books I want to read and not what the big boys tell me I should
read.
I don’t think I’ll bother with WH Smith again.
3 comments:
I could say exactly the same about Teesside (except there IS a Waterstones). There's also a supposed 'independent' bookshop, but it's at least as bad as WHSmith.
One of the benefits of holidays is finding the independent bookshop - so far it's hard to top the one in Stromness!
Dire, isn't it? And should revise a sentence I've written: the books on display aren't what the big publishers think we should be buying and reading. The books for sale are simply the ones that the publishers think will make them the most money. It's all about business and ROI.
And do you know what's worse? Being told what we should read by Richard and Judy? (daytime tv presenters for any non-UK readers of this blog). Do people really believe that R&J actually read all the books submitted to them for their "summer reads" promotions? How much does a spot on the R&J list cost, I wonder?
Cynical? Me? Never! :-)
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