I wasn't going to write again about shopping so soon. I was going to write about how I have planted the Colchicum bulbs that arrived last week without chopping lumps out of any of the other bulbs which are planted there already, which is a minor triumph. And how the Robinia hispida has flopped all over the lawn, and I forgot to buy any stakes when I was at the garden centre, after my trip to the dump (aka tip, aka household recycling centre), which has got a new member of staff who looks disconcertingly like Ronnie Barker (have you noticed how things are disconcerting, but concerted?).
Then I read a few pages of the Telegraph website while drinking a mug of tea and digesting my lunch, and found another wail about independent bookshop closures. It is not a very well informed complaint, since the savings on Amazon are not a matter of saving 10p as the author says in her article, but of paying between 30 and 50% less. And it's just silly to say that an independent bookshop is the last place where you can talk to strangers without resorting to dating websites. I talk to lots of strangers every time I go to work (OK, that is at an independent retailer, albeit not a bookseller). If they look as though they might appreciate it, I even recite bits of poetry to them. Or if you want to talk to strangers you can join a club or society for something you're interested in. I talked to several strangers at the wildlife fair last week. One of the silliest reasons given for keeping post offices open (there are many good reasons) was that queueing in the post office was one of the only times in the week that some old people got to talk to someone. If that is true, it is an urgent reason for making proper social provision for old people, not for forcing the Systems Administrator to go and queue in the post office to to insure the van, instead of taking the preferred option of buying a tax disc over the internet.
But the really ignorant bit of Ms. Caplan's article is when she says that Amazon can't recommend what you should read next, and for that you need a real person. Sorry Nina, but Amazon's algorithms are incredibly powerful. It tracks your purchasing history for ever, and it identifies what else other people with similar purchasing patterns bought, and it makes a very good job of it. Sometimes it comes up with titles by authors I know and like, and sometimes by authors I don't know. The great majority of the time, when I check those out in the review pages of the broadsheets or hear about them on R4, they review well, and when I get round to reading some of them I generally like them. The Amazon readers' reviews are also very useful. I don't necessarily accept their conclusions, but they give a strong pointer to what kind of book it is, and I can decide for myself if I think I'd like that sort of thing.
On the strength of my having bought a lot of Roger Deakin, Amazon told me that I might like Caught by the River, a series of essays about about rivers (link to Amazon here). When my mum asked me what I would like for Christmas, I suggested that, and she kindly bought it for me. Being a staunch supporter of her local independent bookshop (and reluctant to put her card details online), she ordered it from her friendly local bookshop. When she collected it, she had a conversation with the friendly local bookshop owner, who said it looked interesting and she might order another copy for the bookshop. Er, excuse me. You are meant to be providing your customers with ideas of things they might like, not cribbing ideas for good new titles from the Great Satan Amazon. Caught by the River is a lovely book, by the way, and I heartily recommend it. I liked it so much I even ended up buying a print from the man who did some of the illustrations (over the internet, naturally enough).
I'm glad I've got that off my chest, and now I shall go and pull up some more weeds.
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