A complaint (statement? accusation?) I hear from people who come into the Canterbury is that people don’t read anymore or that people don’t buy books anymore. Beyond the irony of making such a claim in a bookstore (and the double-irony that most of those people then proceed to leave the store without having purchased a book), it is also a statement that I don’t think has much merit.

During the court hearings for determining if Random House’s purchase of Simon & Schuster would create an unacceptable level of market concentration, executives from Random House tried to give evidence that the purchase was necessary to combat decreasing levels of readership, presenting some well-picked, arresting statistics to support their claim.

Well, Lincoln Michel wrote an article (https://countercraft.substack.com/p/yes-people-do-buy-books) examining the statistics they presented, and with some further statistics as his counter argument, gave a convincing riposte that people are purchasing just as many books as they always have, going back decades. And granted, perhaps I only find Michel’s argument convincing because it’s the one I want to believe to be true. But if that’s the case, why do some who walk into my store want to believe the opposite?

BECAUSE THEY’RE EVIL!!! Just kidding, that’s obviously not the case. Perhaps they feel left behind by the rate of change in the world and assume no value they hold dear has remained unaffected.