Bookshops

Support Independent Bookshops

There are specialist bookstores for birders and specialist Internet bookstores – even some combining both. If there is one thing guaranteed, it is that these internet sites are a way of finding the cheapest supplier without wearing out your shoe leather, but many do not offer the sort of service that a specialist bookseller can.

You will note that Fatbirder has also linked up to offer you books via the Natural History Bookshop, simply click where it says ‘Buy this book from Natural History Bookshop’ and it will take you to that book and give you a price and further details. (If it doesn’t the book is either out of print, or no longer carried by them).

If you are like me, and most other birders I know, you will have a growing collection of bird books, collecting them seems to become almost as great an obsession as birding itself.

I noted that there used to be a large number of pre-loved bird book sellers represented at the British Bird Fair, and this is a great place to continue your search for out-of-print books… if you can’t find it on line why not ask around at the fair. I am surprised that so few second-hand bookshops have a web presence.

Amazon have done a great deal of harm to independent bookstores. In the short-term shoppers get cheap deals, in the longer-term sources of books and even publishers go out of business and the book trade as a whole suffers, including us book lovers.

Spectacled Eider Somateria fischeri -©Dubi Shapiro – I wonder if they are reading spectacles?

For a while it looked as if the physical book itself would go so out of fashion as to make publishing non-viable. However, like radio and cinema where everyone thought that TV would kill them off, there’s still a market for paper books. And for people who like books and reading, it is not just the contents between the covers but the look, feel and even smell of a book that people find attractive. I admit to being an avid Kindle reader, but I don’t use Kindle for reference books and field guides. Even when I have the app for that same field guide, I like to own the book itself.

There is another aspect of publishing which has been overlooked and that is that publishers have been conduits for literature and to an extent critics thereof. Turning down a book often leads, these days, to people self-publishing and that’s incredibly variable. Whilst in the past even the greats of literature sometimes couldn’t find a publisher, most of that was down to the prejudices of the day rather than simply a lack of skill in writing.

I have to say I have found an awful lot of particularly novels on the internet that are unreadable due to the poor use of language and the lack of writing skill. At the same time, of course, economic considerations sometimes stop books being published by a publishing house. Some end up on the net in a different format simply because they would be so expensive to print. If the printing is very expensive, then the book will have a high price, and in turn will make it unaffordable to many and thus not viable. I have recently come across several self-published books that are actually fabulous, often containing artwork or photographs from the author. Some of these have been least as well written as many that are published by others.

I believe there will always be a market for a book which contains new knowledge or a new way of presenting that knowledge. Hopefully those will continue to be published in physical form and sold by independent booksellers.