The march of universal literacy

Back in the a day before graduating to being a shop assistant here in Michael's Bookshop, I was a mechanic of sorts. Twiddling things, electronic, electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic, metal, wood, even light, I developed a, probably warped view, of what then were called the working classes. 

Amongst this set, were a subset, who while very good at what they did with, wires, pipes, nuts, bolts, wood and saws. when it came to filling out the job sheet, instigated a dialog; thus.

W "Left my reading glasses behind."

M "Do you want to borrow mine?"

W "I'm a bit dyslexic."

M, not wanting to cause an awkward moment for a good worker. "I'll get a charge hand to fill it out with you."

Times have changed and the thumbs now fly across the screen of the smartphone, followed by. "Do you want it by, text or email guv?

Now in the light of current research, which seems to be saying that, screen usage may make you less happy.

Here is the link to the research results


I think the bottom line here is that while the screen has made a great many people more literate and as we know reading is fairly addictive, few people want to read themselves, stupid, angry, less curious or even into "medication time".

For a lot of people this means the paper book.

  (I have used phone pictures of books on the shelves here in the bookshop to illustrate this.) With this picture if your aspirations are a bit like the book on the left, your last encounter with printed books was somewhere in the middle, it can lead to the title on the far right.

 Do you just go on where you left off?

  or perhaps

 jump straight in

 while the iron is hot

with books for your shed.

Pardon the fuzzy phone pictures.

My task over the next few weeks is to check the prices on the books in our craft section and reduce the ones that have gone down in value since we originally priced them.

so while these have maintained their internet prices, in some case the online price has gone up, although I have left ours the same.

 Woodworker annuals have gone down from £4.99 to £2.50, my guess is reflecting similar content on the internet

The objective here is to keep on top of being cheaper than the competition, mostly the internet, I have found that this is the key to staying in business.