Secondhand bookshops don’t have that much to do with
Christmas shopping on the whole, with the internet now being the major source
for new books, I would guess it isn’t what it was in the few remaining new
bookshops.
The exception here being local history books, I would guess
most people who read this blog know I publish about 150 books about East Kent,
especially The Isle of Thanet, all of this with a strong emphasis on books related
to Ramsgate.
One way or another, having eliminated socks, quite a few
local people will give other local people a local history book this Christmas.
Christmas shopping for grownups becomes increasingly difficult every year. When
I was a child virtually every grown up smoked and had a coal fire, so spills
were a favourite, now most grownups spend much of their leisure using some
piece of technology.
A big problem here is that as the technology becomes more
advanced and more personalised, there is progressively less that you can give
to people, that they could possibly enjoy.
A few years ago, apart from the inevitable items of
clothing, most of which was unwearable, the smellies that did the rounds from
one aunt to another and some of which had been presents on more than a dozen
occasions, it was books and records in my family. Exchanges between thinking
and reasonably educated people being like that.
Now we have a situation where what made and educated gift, a
grown up toy, is mostly a non-transferable electronic download of some sort.
Combined with this is the problem that I often find they
have gone out of print and I just can’t get them again. The picture above is of
a few of the new local books we have in stock at the moment.
It is the a very fortunate person who has friends that will
give them desirable secondhand books as presents, the picture above is of some
of the secondhand local books on the shelf in my bookshop today.
Anyway we now come to the panacea, personally I don’t like
being advertised at, Christmas presents are necessary and somehow or another I
have to try and make this work for people as best I can, when it comes to local
history books and frankly I can’t do it as well as I would like if it all
happens at the last minute.
the maps will expand if clicked on and the expanded amp will expand if clicked on again
Michael do you publish any of your titles for the new e-readers ?? I prefer a book myself but more people are going digital.
ReplyDeleteNo Don, doing so would be a fairly time consuming business and the friends I have in the larger local history publishers, that have done this say that the sales of local history books in electronic formats is very small relative to local history books published on paper.
DeleteThat said I do often publish whole free web versions of local history books and link them to this blog.
From personal experience when doing local history research, one uses a mixture of online resources and paper books, in fact a very full desk and lots of pages open on the internet.
I would say that at the moment the technology that works well with specialist non fiction hasn’t yet appeared, whereas reading a novel or biography on a kindle seems to work fine.
I guess a major snag with Kindle is you can’t pass the books around. I know for instance that the novel my son is giving me for Christmas, which I very much want to read, he will want to read after me. I have just looked on Amazon the book is £11 inc post, the kindle download is £10, so it’s £5.50 each to share the book or £10 each for the Kindle edition.
Your map revives bad memories for me,I can see some bombs hits I remember are missing from the record.
ReplyDeleteStargazer.
Stargazer I thing these maps were published during the war and don’t think complete maps were published after it had finished.
DeleteI agree these maps are not complete. Nothing shown on the harbour where several members of the lifeboat crew were injured on 24 August 1940. Others not shown,
DeleteDeckgen.