The importance of bookshops

Having just been reading an article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/24/waterstone-s-vital-book-trade regarding the importance of Waterstones and the opinions that people are having seems to bring a balance in two options. There are those that believe that without people buying in book shops they are the ones at fault and others that believe that the company, in this particular case Waterstones needs to compete better with the online world such as amazon and offer prices at the same.

I can see both sides. Personally I tend to buy books both ways. Depending on the book and what it is for. If it is a particular book that i specifically want, I buy it on amazon, if I am after a book but unsure which one or what I might like I tend to buy it from Waterstones or other highstreet bookshops. Now both of these options are well used in my life. I am regularly in Waterstones, and regularly have parcels arriving. But am I to blame for the failure of high street book stores because i do some shopping online.

I recently went into three of my local libraries to find a book that I wanted to read as a guilty pleasure, an author I grew up with in my teens, but now as an adult should not want to read as i have a more mature mind. But i would like too. The library couldn't offer me the books that I wanted to read as a one off, so now I am left with two options, I could go into Waterstones a pick up the set of books for £6.99 each, which for 5 books is £34.95, a lot of money considering I only wish to read them as a guilty pleasure, not keep them for ever. Online this would be able to be achieved for half the price. Now in an ideal world I could get them from the library and spend my money on books that I really want to read that are more of the I want to keep for every variety.

I have a lot of books, side by side we are looking at around 17metres of books. Which for a 24 year old is quite impressive, and my collection continues to grow. I employ a technique of one Pre. 1940 followed by one more modern book, and I also read a lot of theory and criticism. There are always the need for guilty pleasure reading but these are perhaps the ones we want to be available at ease.

I guess what I am getting at is that the book shops do need to employ a way of competing a little bit with the online world. A local bookshop to me gets the numbers in by arranging events that are truly amazing, in the last year we have had Dawn French, Margaret Atwood, Jodi Picoult, Vince Cable all visiting. Each event was sold out, and because of that the bookshop made a large amount of money on the selling of the books and others by that author on the night. However, to go into the bookshop without these incentives is extremely expensive, and even though they do special things with their books such as signed copies, it is hard to justify being a book addict like me spending £10 more there then i can get elsewhere and have three or four more books for the collection.

I currently do not buy into e-books, eventually I fear I might have to, however i still find that they are not able to be as creative as a wander through any bookshop can be, I don't want a you might like this one, i want to just randomly pick a book off a shelf and read its blurb, a page in the middle to see the writing style and decide I am interested in the subject. Is this not the way that new authors are going to survive in this world? They have to have a bit of luck.