Ever Decreasing Circles

My phone rang today. Nobody ever phones me, apart from my wife, who likes to find things for me to do. I was almost grateful until I heard the unmistakeable acoustic of an Indian call centre: "Hi, I'm Steve MacDonald phoning from BT..."

They have phoned before. Each time, the caller has a strange, fake American accent that sounds like Stephen Hawking's voice simulator. Why would they train their staff to speak like that? Perhaps it's part of a cunning plan to seemlessly replace people with machines in a few years.

I politely ended the call and was plunged back into silence.

During the last month or so, I've found myself becoming increasingly nostalgic about the days when I was a bookshop manager. I think I miss the company of other people. Yesterday, my only visitor was a ram, which ambled nonchalantly around the shelving units before making a sudden, desperate bolt when it saw me.

But would I really want to go back? I know that it must be miserable running a bookshop these days, watching the sales gradually decrease each year. Amazon should just buy Waterstones and rename the shops 'Amazon Showroom'.

Sometimes I think of applying for a part-time job in an office. I'm not sure what I'd do, but I enjoyed the project management aspect of my last job and felt that I was reasonably good at it. It would be nice to work somewhere where my companions had opposing thumbs.

However, my alarm bells rang when a friend told me that in her former workplace, the boss had introduced a 'Onesie Wednesday'. Apparently, everyone in the office was expected to wear one of these:

Great if you like 'onesies'. Embarrassing and deeply offensive if you don't. I'd forgotten about the growing tendency for socially inept people in management to insist that their staff routinely humiliate themselves through 'team building' activities.

Ironically, it's a mental health charity. How depressing.

I suppose I mustn't complain about my working environment. How many jobs offer you the opportunity to watch two middle-aged men half-heartedly dismantle a grain silo?

 Another setback for the British space programme

But aside from the isolation, I'm worried that I might not be able to live by books alone. Sales have been rather slow recently and although I could blame it on the good weather, I also wonder if the secondhand book market is beginning to feel the effects of the Kindle.

When valuing books, I've noticed that an increasing number of backlist titles have been digitised. Ebooks may not be able to compete with my gorgeous, clothbound editions, but most of my stock veers towards the mankier side of tolerable, selling to people who just want the text at the cheapest price.

There is nothing to stop Amazon from making sure that their Kindle versions undercut every other copy on sale.

My other concern is about the supply chain. At the moment, there is a thriving 'penny book' business on Amazon and eBay, fuelled by donations to charity shops and book banks (my stock is the waste product of those businesses, as many people find non-barcoded books too labour-intensive).

However, as sales to continue to migrate to the ebook format - particularly for paperback fiction - the penny book market's future must surely have a limited lifespan.

Of course people will still want books, but the number who prefer print won't be enough to sustain the industry at its current level. The specialist antiquarian booksellers are safe, but the rest of us are probably in trouble.

I feel as if I ought to start developing a Plan B.