It has always been a close-at-hand item in the stock PR of the book trade that booksellers “welcome browsers”. It is, however, an improbable notion when you think about it: booksellers welcome bookbuyers, and indeed why wouldn’t they given that those of them who still survive are trading in circumstances that get more difficult each year in terms of swelling overheads and bruising competition? Ah, but browsers, you say, are merely buyers in chrysalis who will, one day soon, burst gloriously into wing at the cash point. Perhaps. 

Bookseller resentment of the chronic non-buying browser – and his cousin, the bookshop crank - has a long history (“a bookshop – so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise”, wrote Orwell in “Bookshop Memories”; the whole essay is worth reading). Any bookshop, for the CNBB, is idyllic enough; paradise is when there are also comfortable seats and, if at all possible, coffee (indeed why not free coffee?).

Booksellers have experimented with books/coffee combinations, but those who have not given up on it as an indulgence at least now try to separate the two physically. Lounging around with latte and Remembrance of Things Past may attract the opposite sex, but Proust encrusted with chocolate muffin is surely a turnoff for a possible buyer who might come along later.

In California, where laptops, netbooks and e-readers are common, coffee and reading combinations other than the bookshop space are prevalent. But what is this we read in the Los Angeles Times about a backlash?

“Coffeehouses have always attracted bookish deadbeats who stayed too long and bought too little. But suddenly these shops were teeming with electricity- and table-hogging laptops, leaving trails of tangled power cords and hard feelings. Too many customers spread out at big tables for long stretches over a lukewarm mug, forcing cafes to turn away business. One New York cafe even had a customer who installed himself and his desktop computer at one of its tables each day.

“Cafe owners who grumble the loudest are those who serve meals. Customers who linger solo at large tables while working on their laptops can squeeze out the more lucrative lunch or dinner crowds. That has got to be a bigger headache during the recession when frugal customers consumed less and stayed even longer, prompting more cafes to impose restrictions to encourage turnover.”

Coffeehouse owners spoke of the need to preserve the culture of their café as a place of meeting and exchanging ideas, publishingperspectives.com reports. “This culture does not have room for laptops and e-readers, but print books and newspapers are still ‘embraced’ by owners and are part of the culture these coffeehouses are hoping to regain. In defining their values and the values of their customers, owners working to remove electronic devices from their cafés have drawn a definite distinction – print books are cultured, electronic books are not.”

Read the article in publishingperspectives.com here: