To begin, one of my favourite quotes:
“He who burns books will, in the end, also burn people”
- Heinrich Heine
Has the world gone MAD? It has been obvious for a while now that we all have our priorities a little out of whack but surely when it gets to the point of having bookshops without books we need to sit down and have a serious re-think?!
I was pointed in the direction of this article, and while it’s nice to read about the world around me sometimes on this occasion I wish I hadn’t.
A little background information. I love books. I love books the way most people can only truly love other living creatures. Not that I don’t also love living creatures, people, etc., but I have a passionate love for the written word which I know to be alien to many. For as long as I can remember books have been my sanctuary, and bookshops have been my temple. I would, naturally, rather stay away from the bigger “chainstores”, but the sad fact is that they have already done too much damage to the proverbial Little Shop Around the Corner and now if you want books you go to Waterstones or Hodges Figgis and try to pretend they’re not both run by the same person.
Now the news comes that the aforementioned ’same person’, who also miserably runs HMV, is ruining everything. Not content with commercialising literature rather hideously - I do love getting 3 books for the price of 2 but would really love if they weren’t all in the bestsellers lists already - these people have now decided to abolish it altogether.
Well, not quite - but close enough. Apparently “acamedic and humanities” books will no longer be stocked in-store. The supposed redemption of this plan being that “they will still be available online”. In an age where we worry about reading levels because children are reared by games consoles, THAT is going to help? I know I’m a purist, and I know most people are happy to download music and don’t need to browse for hours flicking through ‘actual’ albums before making a choice. In fact I know that the music downloads problem is a significant factor in the reasoning behind the re-organisation (I’ll be polite) of Waterstones’ priorities. But it still makes me want to cry.
I don’t care if google et al. scan every word of every great book ever written and/or printed and it’s all available free of charge online - I still want, nay NEED, to be able to walk into a shop, and hunt down the history section, and pull out three or four books on obscure ancient civilizations, and smell the paper before I make my purchase…
How can it be so easy to shelve (by which I mean de-shelve!) such a huge swathe of knowledge? How can little men in a boardroom somewhere in London sit down and decide “no, the PS3 isn’t selling well enough, let’s cancel academia”. Isn’t it bad enough that the heads of our universities are betraying the humanities, without every high street book seller jumping on this particularly comfortable bandwagon!???
