supersimbo.com

Thats 6 words i love to hear!

In fact, i use Amazon quite often & i know this statement to be true for pretty much everything, certainly for books & music. I will find what i want, quicker, easier and often less expensive via Amazon!

There will always be all kinds of debate about whether price is what drives customers to Amazon, or whether it is the ease of purchasing – 3 clicks is about as much as it takes – but i wonder how often the debate is about supporting your local bookshop. I often buy books in Waterstone’s so i’m not just referring to Christian Bookshops…..

But then i need to stop and ask myself, “who really cares if there is a bookshop in our town?”

In Christian circles, many will speak of the Bookshop as a ministry, but are they? I can instantly think of a LOT of customers who regularly visit the Ballymena shop, and they would really miss the ‘ministry’ aspect of the shop that many of you don’t see.

The last time i blogged about this stuff, someone said in the comments that customers want something else, they want us to go the extra mile, (i’m paraphrasing)  but what does that even mean?

Often, the customer doesn’t know what they want, but ‘cheaper than everyone else’ will make their mind up for them.

That is the harsh reality of where we are in retail – not just bookselling, and not just Christian Bookselling – iv been doing this for long enough to at least know that much!

With Wikipedia allowing you to handpick the contents that you want in any book about anything (see the video) – what is the future going to be like? The present is hard enough for many!

As i have said many times, we are about 10 years behind everyone else here in Northern Ireland so we have some catching up to do in the doom & gloom stakes. Christian Bookshops in Northern Ireland are still busy places, still supported by many Churches and may not be in steep decline just yet.

But, as i hear ‘you can get it on amazon’ more and more & even as i sometimes say those words myself i have to wonder if your town will have a ‘Christian’ Bookshop in 5-10 years and whether the ‘Christian’ people of your town will even notice its absence?

H/T Chad Jarnagin

I use twitter a lot, though i have been trying to cut back intentionally which has been made easy when busy with work but…….

This morning my phone app would not post messages and i could not log into my account in a web browser. I was unable to reset my password and i knew i had not changed it so what to do?

I reported the issue with twitter and received an automated response via email…..

That was before 11am this morning….

So far i have had no resolution

I thought they were better than this…

Update: 15.16 problem solved, approximately 10 minutes after i posted this blog! well done twitter!

Yesterday afternoon i logged back into facebook!

I de-activated my account at the beginning of December last year and between then and now had never set a date for a return.

Yesterdays return was not planned and has been like returning to a former place of employment or the “Church” i spent most of my teenage years attending. Full of familiar faces but the same old nonsense…….

It took me all of 10 minutes to feel like this. I removed a huge chunk of my “friends” for various reasons but in the midst of all that and changing privacy settings i stopped and asked myself why i was doing this……..why was i using facebook?

Well, the truth is i do not know. Sure there are some people in other countries who i really like and its a good way to snoop on what they are doing and for them to snoop on what i am doing without making any real effort to stay in touch. But, I have  my blog, i have twitter and i have email which for now anyway do a better job of meeting those needs with a little less snooping!

Having said that i am genuinely flattered that some people welcomed my return to facebook.

The conclusion i have come to is that facebook is on probation. Call it a last chance or whatever, but i have given it an undisclosed time for me to see how i feel. The invitations to groups and the applications and the stream of advertising that has eclipsed the original purpose for the whole thing weighs heavily against it right now but………

We shall see….