Bookstore Sales up 2.5%

Bookstore
Bookstore by Martin Cathrae

Publishers Weekly posted an article yesterday about a rise in book sales.  While this is welcome news to any book nerd, myself included, I’m still so sad that there was such a dive in book sales to begin with.  Don’t get me wrong I love reading on my kindle, iPhone and iPad, but I miss all the bookshops that once littered malls and especially the smaller mom and pop books stores, that sold new and used books.

These were the real diamond in the rough.  I loved to be walking in a new small town and come across a bookstore selling new or used books.  Browsing through bookstores is FUN!  Even if you don’t come away with anything they give you this wonderful feeling knowing that they are there for a return visits, when next time you might find that real jewel of a book that becomes your new all-time favorite.

The article states that we hit 11.17 billion in sales last year, up from last year, but horribly down from the pre-2009 high of 17 billion.  I hope we return to this number and I hope it is soon, because I want to see new bookstores opening up all over the place for book nerd browsing!

Reading Log

Stockholm Public Library
Stockholm Public Library by Samantha Marx

I ran across a link to May McLay Patterson’s enormously long titled I Read 164 Books in 2015 and Tracked them all in a Spreadsheet.  Here is what I learned. article.  It starts of a little too wordy for me and then the first tip is not to finish every book you start.  So far, this sounds like the same advice I’ve heard from a million other people, most notably Nancy Pearl.

I track what I’ve read and what I want to read on goodreads, but I also have a spreadsheet.  Just something simple on google sheets.  In 2015 I was interested if I read more male authors work or female.  So I started tracking it (67% male).  Patterson mentions that Amanda Nelson of Book Riot not only records their gender but also their nationality, and whether or not they identify as a person of color.  I thought this is great finally a way to better my existing system.

I loved that Patterson liked Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Salem, 1692 because that book is on my short list of to TBR.  It drives me crazy that I haven’t read it yet.

Last year, the BBC reported that translations comprise just 2 to 3 percent of English publishing, compared with 27 percent in France and up to 70 percent in Slovenia.

Wow!  I’ve read two books this year that are translations The Stranger and Missing Person.  Both, oddly enough French translations.  Go figure!  Make that three, I didn’t realize that Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist was a translation.

I’m reading the article as I write this.  Patterson is a librarian and the more I read of this article the more my desire to be a librarian increases.  I’ve known for several years that I would like to do that kind of work, but I haven’t acted on it yet.  To many responsibilities to try to make this happen right now.  Maybe much later?

At the end of every book I loved, I felt transformed. I wanted to tell everyone about it…

I find this frustrating as none of my friends read as much as I do.  The ones that come close are not people I talk to as often as I would like.  I work with them and I’m too busy at work to have a long book conversation most days.  This is frustrating, I assume if you are a librarian you get to talk books a lot more.  Again, jealous!

I’m done now, and I feel that you would do well to read this article if you are a reader of books.  I enjoyed it.  Have fun and keep reading!