I’m not exaggerating. There used to be a lovely big Books Etc on Victoria Street where you could lose yourself for an hour and find all sorts of unexpected treasures: while browsing in the sports section there I bought a copy of Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, which had me in tears after ten minutes.
But when I went to where Books Etc had once been the other day, I discovered that it had transmogrified into something called Oliver Bonas. This sounds like the sort of place that might sell dog treats but in reality it was not nearly so useful. It was, in fact, a modern day bazaar of overpriced knick-knacks that proposed to sell me, in no particular order, a mirror, a chest of drawers, a dress, a pair of sunglasses with lenses like hearts, an array of ‘humorous’ greeting cards, a picnic hamper and a keyring in the shape of a meerkat. Not much to enrich my mind, although it might well have reduced me to tears after ten minutes.
So I set off for a nearby shopping centre where there used to be a small bookstore. But when I got to the place that had once dispensed wisdom and joyous abandon, all was in darkness. It was obviously in the process of being transformed into a knick-knack emporium that would soon be selling sunglasses in the shape of meerkats.
I gave up. When I got back to the office, my colleague was fussing over an enormous package that had arrived from Canada.
He pulled a small, flat screen from its shiny wrapper and announced that ‘my iPad has arrived’.
I didn’t take much notice. When it comes to communications technology, I was full up when mobile phones became smaller than bricks. I studiously ignore everything with the word Apple or BlackBerry in the title unless it relates to making a pie. But a few hours later I had to sit up and take notice when my colleague started reading books on his iPad. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ve got an entire bookshop here…’ tap tap… ‘and a shelf of books here…’ tap tap… ‘and the book I’m reading is here…’
‘I’ve got a shelf of books here,’ I said, pointing to the actual shelf of books above my head.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, as if the actual shelf of books was merely a figment of my overactive luddite imagination. ‘Look, I can press the page and turn it,’ he said, a look of sheer wonderment on his face.
‘I can turn the page of my book, too,’ I said, turning the page of a book.
‘Yeah,’ he said, disinterestedly. ‘And I can do this…’ tap tap… ‘and this…’ tap tap. Suddenly I had an idea. ‘Can you do this?’ I said, and threw one of my actual books on the floor, then picked it up and started reading it again.
He ignored me.
‘Look,’ I said, dropping it again, then throwing it across the room with extreme force and nearly hitting someone. ‘Also, I can read it by the pool on holiday and drop it in the pool, then dry it out on a sunbed and read it again with the pages a bit crinkly and smelling of chlorine — a smell they will retain when they return to my bookshelf back home, so enshrining the memory of my holiday because smell is one of the most evocative of the senses.’ I held my book to my face and smelt it. ‘Mmmmm! New book. What does yours smell of?’
Tap tap.
‘OK, fine. But won’t you miss going to a bookshop? Standing in the aisles surrounded by the different coloured covers, experiencing the closeness of all that knowledge, going from one row to another, picking the actual books off the actual shelves?’
‘I can still go to a bookshop.’
‘How so?’
‘I can go to a bookshop to browse, then come back and order what I want on my iPad.’
‘But how are the bookshops to stay open if you go there but don’t spend money?’
Tap tap. Tap tap.
I suppose someone will have to invent a place where we go to read books but not buy them. Maybe we could call these places ‘libraries’. Then, if people grow to like holding books in their hands, we could extend the concept to maybe selling people the books to take home permanently.
You never know, it might catch on.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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