The Lost Art Of Browsing

At the London Book Fair, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood recently spoke of how buying books online may be convenient and fun, but precludes the joys of browsing and serendipity. Ishiguro, however, warned against sentimentalising the independent bookshop: “I’m not really nostalgic for them. Those tiny independent bookshops with some dragon behind the desk on the phone to her daughter, or the politically committed bookshops with tons of stuff about Chairman Mao.”