Ramsgate and Broadstairs in 2012 spot the difference

The slow changes make it difficult to tell the direction things are going in and I guess when taking the photos it is difficult to think in April 2012 that when viewing them in April 2019 you could have taken, more, some different ones. Something like time travel perhaps.

I hope I am taking ones now that will be more useful in 2026 but I doubt it, I particularly notice that I didn't take any of Farley's Furniture shop, I guess I though it would stay the same forever. I do know that I took a load inside there, if I put them on the internet then perhaps I will find them eventually, Google is not the search engine it was and is much more focused towards selling people things.

If I saved them on some computer then there is a very good chance they were lost in some ITC issue, 2012, it is only very recently that I have started saving the majority of my camera photos to the cloud.

I keep thinking about monetising the blog, I often get messages about this and I suppose if it made money for Google then the posts may have some sort of better search engine ranking. The downside of this is is that I think a lot of readers would prefer to stay in the local history and secondhand book bubble, with the occasional local art exhibition thrown in.   

Workwise here at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate where the books are mostly secondhand, it's not so much about increasing sales as maintaining a balance between what we can buy and what we sell. This isn't even about trying to buy lots of old or expensive books as I would think the average price of the books we sell is around £2.

We are always keen to buy good quality books, although putting across the type of books we are most likely to buy is difficult. I think we usually buy dedicated books collections and this April the main dedicated collections have been about paddle steamers, seaplanes, southern region railways, east kent, military uniforms, WW1, several collections of fiction. The other side of this coin is that a lot of the books we see are car fulls of the books that were of special offer in the main supermarkets in 2014, 15, 16, 19 and 18. The very same books that appear on the shelves of the majority of charity shops. Often nothing wrong with the books apart from the secondhand book market being glutted with them. If you get a glut of oranges you can make marmalade, however a glut of James Patterson crime books is a difficult one. This type of glut doesn't make the James Patterson books better or worse, so a bit of a balancing act.

Another type of collection, and a type we often by is all the books in one series, today's bookshop blog post is an example and focuses on Noddy books here is the link  

Anyway here are the 2012 pictures