Is bookstore browsing a dying art? From the Times Online yesterday:
Margaret Atwood, the Canadian author whose books include The Edible Woman, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000, said that the “serendipity” of discovering something in a bookshop has not been replicated online.
Kazuo Ishiguro, another Booker Prize winner, agrees. He told The Times yesterday that shopping for books on the internet was helpful for his work “but it’s not fun”.
Atwood told the London Book Fair last week: “You are not going to get the same experience on the net. Amazon is trying, by saying, ‘If you like this book you might like this other book’, but it’s often something quite offensive that they suggest.”
She added that the success of internet retailers meant that bookshops were missing out on “the sales that they wouldn’t expect to make, but make because somebody sees this beautiful cover and they pick it up and read the front flap.
And today they published a counterpoint: The net: not guilty of grievous harm to bookshops.
I agree with what Margaret Atwood says, but as an obsessive book browser and buyer, on-line and off, I think there's probably room for both.
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