Back to ye olde bookshop

TWhat you’re holding in your hand is the new

microwave

“range” on the shelves, comprising long-tail titles that are sought by just a few readers a few times a year; and Western classics in steady supply — including Jane Austen, a name Trisk has mentioned as too-often missing from among the spines in the shops that are now his.

Will he still sell e-books? It’s uncertain. EB’s website currently boasts several hundred thousand of them, but Trisk is dubious about the digital book’s staying power. “What you’re holding in your hand is the new microwave,” he said on the radio recently to a caller with a Kindle. By this, presumably, he meant a device that failed to cause the storm of disruption everyone predicted, and now plays second fiddle in the kitchen. We still roast turkeys in our ovens, after all. Perhaps, in 20 years, we will still make a feast of hardcovers and paperbacks à la Trisk.

EB’s retail footprint is shrinking: in recent years it has closed almost 10 stores. Its pillar product, the humble book, will soon be offered to a generation of millennials with hyper-connected habits. Will they put away their second-fiddle devices, enter that antique land, the bookshop, look on the works of Jane Austen, and call it home? It won’t take long to find out. Link love: Foodie Fiction From the best barbecue scene ever in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes to the slowly boiled fish stew featuring throughout Ian McEwan’s Saturday , here are 50 novels for foodies:

http://bit.ly/FoodieFiction