Why I end up buying most of my books online...

[craftyhobbit]

I read/collect alot of books, mostly in the sci-fi and fantasy genre, but occassionally I read historical fiction, non fiction books about history, espeacially the Anicent Egyptians, and Europe (Vikings, Celts, and the Tudor era - Tudor is probably the latest that holds my interest, apart from Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and the discoveries in Natural History of that time. I've always had an interest in Natural History and Zoology, but not those nature diary books which are more about the author, but on the animals (and sometimes plants, trees, fungi, etc, themselves). One thing that I find is increasingly problematic is access to books. I want to buy books from actual bookshops, but I find most of the time I end up ordering them online, rather than purchasing from bookshops, and here is an example of it...

I recently found out that Waterstones will reserve a book for you, if they have it in stock. I looked up a bunch of books that I am interested in - some were out of print, which is fair enough that they didn't have them - some weren't and of the thirty or so books that I looked up, only 4 were in stock for click and collect. There wasn't even an option for having the books that weren't in stock delivered to the store, either. People often say don't buy from Amazon, don't buy online, etc, but when your local shop doesn't have most of the books that you want to buy in stock, where else are you going to get them from?

I e-mailed a local independant bookshop a few weeks ago, asking if they had a list of books that I wanted in stock - that was quite annoying because I had to ask the same question over three or four of their social media accounts before I got an answer (I don't know why companies bother having social media accounts if they ignore customers/potential customers on there) and when I got a reply, they didn't have even one of them in stock. I might have given them my custom if they'd had one or two of them, but I'm not going to bother if they don't because it shows that they don't care about their customers. (All the marketing techiques that they use don't mean a thing when they neglect a genre.)