Dan gave this to Paddy for Xmas.
The author is a 2nd hand bookseller in Wigtown, a small Scottish town in Galloway, not far from Stranraer, where you get the ferry over to Larne or Belfast. He takes quite a pride in his acerbic tone and the book is very repetitive, quite factual in terms of daily takings, events etc. I suspect he is quite an unlikeable man.
Where the book is interesting is in his vitriolic hatred of Amazon, e-readers (a kindle which has been assaulted by his shotgun is pictured in the book and I think is framed in the shop). As Paddy says, there is some irony here as the book is now an Amazon best seller. I am sure that if you make a living selling 2nd hand books e-readers are annoying, and I wasn’t aware of the competitive pressure imposed on the book trade by both the digitalisation of books and Amazon’s ability to force prices down by creating an electronic auction house for the lowest priced copies. But this is just commercial life.
There is nothing inherently interesting about a book as a physical object (unless perhaps beautifully illustrated); we buy and read them for their verbal content. I would much rather take a kindle + charger on holiday than try to squeeze 10 novels into an already full case as I used to.
He is probably right in saying that the commercialisation of the publishing industry inhibits risk taking and creativity, but plus ca change…
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