When I was in London earlier this year, I knew I had to go to the Waterstones at Piccadilly Circus. I had heard a lot of lovely things about that seven-storey building – just think of the books they had, the space they had. I wasn’t disappointed; in fact, there were eight floors (I hadn’t considered the basement). I spent about two hours there, exploring the floors, wincing at the prices of the coffee and food at the restaurant and, of course, getting a few books.
This got me thinking about the size of bookstores, both there and back here, which I would like to reminisce about today. These are just opinions based on observations rather than a scientific study, please keep that in mind.
The Piccadilly Waterstones is rather like Thalia in Austria in terms of size: massive floors worth of books in German and English, made for everyone in the cities in which they reside (Salzburg or Linz, for example), with smaller independent bookstores scattered about.
This stands in contrast with the bookshops we have here, which are not only exclusively single-floor establishments but are also remarkably smaller than Waterstones Piccadilly and Thalia Linz. The largest that I have encountered is Exclusive Books Waterfront, which, while bigger than average, is still only a single floor.
However, that stands in even broader contrast to the bookshops (or lack thereof) in Ethiopia. A casual Google search will reveal an absence of bookshops outside the capitals. Indeed, the Ethiopian bookshop I am most well acquainted with, the airport bookstore, is only a small corner of a gadget shop, with tiny shelves and even tinier offerings.
Sometimes the absence of a thing, when compared to the overabundance of a thing, reveals a lot about supply and demand for reading.
Both the UK and Austria have extremely high literacy rates, which would correlate with a higher demand for books, supply is met. Education is also a factor, as well as cities. One cannot expect bookstores to be as large as those in Vienna and London. Fewer people mean less demand and thus less supply.
Hence why even in rural areas, the bookshops are single-floored in Austria or the UK. Unfortunately, South Africa doesn’t have that. In our biggest cities, we only have single-floored, often small bookstores.
Let’s not even speculate how small the bookshops are in Ethiopia.
The smallness of bookshops in South Africa suggests an absence of demand that would incentivise multi-storey shops. The lack of demand for books sees the shop squared away in the depths of a gadget shop at the Addis Ababa airport. The literacy rate suggests a lack of demand for books, either produced or sold.
A fact that seems to show the absence of bookstores outside the capital cities. From what I have seen on Google Maps, there is a veritable drought of bookshops in non-urban areas, and they are rather small compared to our bookstores.
When people cannot read, they cannot learn, and if they cannot learn, they cannot understand the world around them better.
The literacy rate is something we tend not to think about until we notice its decline or absence. While we are doing better than Ethiopia, we are still facing worrying trends in literacy rates among young children. Children are struggling with literacy, with 76% of fourth graders being unable to read for meaning.
Children are the future, and to keep our second place in Africa, we need to invest in our children’s education.
If we do, then I hope we can see those multi-storey bookstores in South Africa.
