Prologue

Hello all and welcome to my first blog post! I'm very excited to be starting this project, and I hope that you are excited to be hearing about it. I want to dedicate this first post to explaining more in depth my project and what drew me to it. 

It's first important to mention that growing up, reading was a huge part of my life. I had a hunger for books that began with my parents reading to me every night before bed and then, eventually, me reading to them. I became obsessed with stories and couldn't get enough, reading well above the standard difficulty level for my age by the time I was in second grade. Since I read so many books, my parents would often take me to the bookstore, an occasion rare enough to make it an extremely coveted break in my childhood routine. I would walk through the doors into the comforting hush of the bookstore, entranced by the seemingly endless maze of towering bookshelves. If given the opportunity, I could have stayed all day, picking up books at random and flipping through them, even if they were well above my reading level. I just loved seeing the words on the page, even before I could fully grasp their meaning.

Nowadays, I don't get to read as much as I used to, but what can you expect from a girl who goes to one of the most rigorous schools in the country? Nevertheless, the less free time I have to read, the more I appreciate and take advantage of it. It may take me a month to read a book I could have otherwise probably finished off in less than a week, but it doesn’t make me love reading any less; if anything, it just makes me more selective of the books I do read (after all, who wants to waste time reading a book they don’t enjoy?).

This brings me to my senior project. As you can probably tell, I am a fan of physical books. I have a kindle, but I can’t even remember the last time I used it. And I know I’m not the only person who has this kind of attachment to books and, thus bookstores. So what I want to know is what makes people go to brick-and-mortar bookstores to buy these physical books when they have so many other options in this age of technology (and online shopping)? Theoretically, ebooks and buying books online should be more convenient, and yet people still go out of their way to go to bookstores, especially independent (or “indie”) bookstores.

 In order to try to understand this anomaly, I will be working at both locations of Changing Hands Bookstore, a local indie bookshop, shadowing all aspects of the bookselling side of things as well as surveying customers to try to understand their perspective on this. I’ll also be visiting some other indie bookstores around the country as well as a “big box” bookstore (Barnes & Noble) in order to get a more well-rounded view of the bookstore market.

I hope that by reading this you learned a bit more about what I will be exploring for the next few months! My Senior Project Proposal (linked in the right tab) goes into much more detail of the specifics, so feel free to check that out as well. Again, I am very eager to see where my research takes me, and I hope you are as well. I’ll be back again with another post in mid-February, but until then, happy reading!