the nameless horror

So apparently, Waterstones has decided that capitulation is the only honourable choice, that or the chain’s upper management have been smoking some really rocking shit. The details are yet to be released, but from the sounds of the arrangement, Waterstones and Amazon will have a deal whereby you can buy books via your Kindle in-store from Amazon, presumably allowing Waterstones an affiliate percentage (or vice versa) for arranging the sale.

[Quick edit to add: unless they really are expecting you to purchase a specific Waterstones-labelled ereader and shop on that (presumably for those who’ve not yet taken the software/hardware plunge). In which case, well, everything below will only happen the quicker..]

I appreciate, in all seriousness, that MD James Daunt is “selling reading”, and that this is an attempt to keep his chain (and bookselling in general) relevant in a digital age by offering, effectively, what Amazon is exceedingly poor at - “curation”, presenting to the customer things they might want that they never knew existed and making it easy to find good stuff.

But - and I’m not the only one by any chalk to think similar things - given that ebook sales are rapidly overtaking print (albeit print, especially for big, colourful non-fic - photo and fashion books, some types of text books, etc. etc., though the iPad-only ibooks will and are making inroads here too - won’t die out completely), and given that you have to sustain massive amounts of very expensive town centre real estate and staffing costs, it seems insane, totally, utterly, insane, to say: “Sure, we’ll accept only making x% on what we would’ve had from the dwindling print sales to feed from a growing portion of electronic ones that are, nevertheless, cutting our existing sales base off at the knees, while you work on figuring out how to better curate your own content so we won’t be needed, and in the meantime we’ll make it seem more ordinary to buy via your hardware until we exist only as a sort of vestigial showroom storefront, commercially and financially fucked, while you kick on into the future.”

Obviously my own opinion is showing through there. I doubt anyone actually said that when Bezos invited Daunt to the Death Star and told him to turn or be destroyed, but I imagine that will turn out to be more or less the gist of the deal.

Waterstones isn’t B&N, it doesn’t have its own hardware and ebook storefront known across the land and beyond as the Other Place to buy books. It’s sold the Sony ereader for a few years (though I’ve never noticed much push for a matching online storefront, however much I’m sure that one exists), and presumably that experiment tanked. The management - and if, as that profile of Daunt suggests, he’s kept most stores open and encouraged, in a few at least, a return to the more independent buying habits of the pre-hub days, he’s to be applauded - clearly see the future as being primarily digital. It’s just a shame that they seem to have settled for slowly turning the company into something between a living museum and a UK customer service front end for Amazon while all the money-making happens out the back in the parent organisation’s HQ inside a hollowed-out volcano. Shaped like a skull.

“I’m selling reading,” says Daunt, who shares my view that, from many perspectives, this is a golden age for the consumer. “We have to insinuate ourselves into the process, and we have to be seamless.” On closer examination, “seamless” turns out to mean persuading Waterstones customers to choose an e-reader (and ebooks) through a Waterstones-sponsored device. Daunt won’t say when this will happen – “it’s the bit we have to get right” – but it’s imminent. “We’ll be different from Amazon,” he says, with characteristic ebullience, “and we’ll be better.”

Huh. I see.

I distinctly remember the day I became an atheist. I don’t remember how old I was because I was so young - four, I think; just before or just starting school. Religion wasn’t a big thing when I was little - Dad’s a (somewhat vague) Catholic, Mum an atheist, and both had apparently agreed to basically not make a thing of it, figuring we’d sort things out ourselves. Which in hindsight was very sensible - while my sister and I each went through sort of vague hippyish New Agey phases in our difficult teenage years, as you do, before deciding that was all so much toss (for all I know, my brother did too, but he’d have done it after I moved out and wasn’t there to see it), none of us ever got caught up on the notion that we’d somehow disappoint our family, friends or community if we’d been brought up one thing only to decide to be another. I’ve seen that more than once, and it’s always nasty, usually running very deep because this thing has been a part of that person for as long as they can remember.

Thanks, parents.

Anyway, back to my infant self. I’d been aware of the “big beardy angel-wrangler” notion of (what Grown Up Me appreciates was only ever the kids’ dumbed-down blobby version of the Christian) God that you can’t really avoid if your playschool uses a church hall, even if it’s not a church playgroup, and vaguely aware that my dad at least, and many other people, seemed to think he was real. Crucially, that he watched everything, that you could talk to him and ask him for things, and that he was capable of helping out in ways that were basically magic.

Basic interventionist deity, which is more or less how he gets portrayed in his best-known works. Raising the dead, drowning the whole world, stuffing someone into a fish for days for daring not to go to some place to tell some people they were wicked because God was, one assumes, too busy stuffing his prophets into fishes to get someone more local to do the job. All that jazz.

My infant self was never, that I recall, especially convinced by this idea. (I also never, as far as I remember, believed in Santa Claus. Even though I didn’t conclusively prove his non-existence until the age of about seven when I finally managed to stay up until midnight to catch my mum in the act of putting a satsuma in my stocking.) The problem was that in the stories you heard, God was all about wading in, laying about with fire and storms and driving your enemies before you, but despite all the people who claimed he was still the same chap, these events didn’t seem to happen in real life. Not, especially, to a four year-old in Langney.

Then there were the other people, the ones who claimed that he wasn’t the same chap, that all that stuff with the wise men and what have you ended up with Jesus magicking all the bad things anyone had ever done away - not that it stopped them happening - and in return, in what seemed like a very bad deal, God basically took a back seat and left everyone to their own devices. No more floods, storms, turning people into salt, raising the dead etc. In which case, I wondered, why did people still spend all this time acting like he was still looking over their shoulder? What was the point in asking for anything if basically the answer was already “no, sorry, I don’t do that any more”? Wasn’t that just stupid?