The End Times

On Monday, my best supplier phoned to tell me that they were closing down and that this was my last chance to get some books. I was shocked. It had seemed such a well-run business, with hard-working, motivated staff.

What had gone wrong?

I didn't have time to book a van, so I decided to spend a day there sorting through the stock and bring the best books back in the car.

When I arrived, the following day, the staff seemed philosophical about the closure. Someone told me that the sales had been declining steadily for quite a while and the business had reached a point where it was no longer making any money. They'd been given the bad news last Friday, with one week's notice.

My prediction about the penny book market was right, including its effect on my business. I wonder when my turn will come?

But if the Lewes branch of W.H.Smith's is to be believed, some people are still buying books:

I wonder how many people actually read the celebrity biographies they've been given for Christmas. The paperback sales for older titles would suggest that the vast majority of these books are unread.

For example, in November and December 2000, my bookshop sold around 400 copies of this:

It was one of the bestselling books of the season. The following year it came out in paperback and everyone expected it to be a popular holiday reading title.

We sold six copies.

During my last day at the supplier, I saw thousand of celebrity biographies in a huge waste container. At some point they will be pulped and turned into something useful.

I must have sorted through 2,000 books yesterday and arrived home with just 350. I was covered in dust and the remnants of rusty water from when I tripped and fell in a waterlogged skip. I went to the loo to wash my hands and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

I looked feral, in a vaguely post-apocalyptic way.

At home I had a bath and changed into my Lewes gentleman's clothes to attend the screening of a documentary on fracking. I'm ashamed to say that I knew very little about the subject until last night and only went to support a friend who had organised the evening. I'm very glad I went.

Here's the trailer:

Our friend was nervous about the event. She'd arranged for the director, Josh Fox, to present the film and answer questions afterwards. A few days earlier he'd been doing the same thing in Los Angeles. How would he feel talking to a dozen people in Lewes?

We arrived expecting a half-empty hall. Instead, we found this:

It looks a little like a neo-Nazi rally or an over-enthusiastic question and answer session, but they were just holding their hands up for a photo-shoot, which Josh Fox later tweeted. There were around 400 people, some of whom were veterans from the recent protest at Balcombe.

The documentary was an eye-opener. Until last night, all I knew about fracking was that it involved pumping water into the ground and fracturing rocks - a process that might cause minor earthquakes. I had no idea that the water that was being pumped included carcinogenic chemicals and elements that include benzene, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, mercury, lead and uranium.

Even allowing for the director's bias, the scientific evidence seemed overwhelming. If we permit fracking in the United Kingdom, there is a very real danger that our water supplies will become contaminated as they have been in parts of the USA.

Before the film began, several people spoke passionately about fracking. I was most impressed by a very ordinary-looking man who said that he'd come all the way from Blackpool to warn us not to believe the hydraulic fracturing companies:

"They said they'd be able to pump the contaminated water back up and take it to the one treatment plant in the UK that deals with water like this. But the plant couldn't cope with such a quanity at that level of pollution. They were overwhelmed. In the end, they had to quietly dump some of it in the Manchster Ship Canal."

I thought of a BBC News clip that show children swimming in the canal, earlier in the year.

I'm not a scientist, but even my rudimentary grasp of the subject tells me that if you pump polluted water down into the earth and fracture rocks, those fractures will create fissures. Gravity will pull the water down into these cracks,at which point we no longer have any control over where it goes.

Of course, we can't prove that any future fracking activity in Balcombe will have an impact on the local water table. But as one person in the audience pointed out, the burden of proof lies with the energy companies to prove that fracking is safe, not for the protesters to prove that it's dangerous.

I will keep reading around the subject - I want to hear as many opposing arguments as possible.

In the interests of balance, here's a film from Chevron.



Has that reassured you?

I will not be buying a 'Frack Off!' t-shirt - I think that pun alienates as many people as it amuses. But unless the energy companies and pro-fracking lobby manage to put forward a convincing case, I will be joining the protest.

It has been a day a grim forebodings. A bookless future, drinking poisoned water out of methane-leaking taps. It sounds like a Kevin Kostner film.

I think it's time to watch another DVD boxed set.

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.