In an era when the infringement of technology is unrelenting, having an area away from a screen can be a true blessing.
In this day and age we spend so much of our time looking at screens. Our work is extremely frequently on screens, and they are turning into a much larger part of our working life, and the manner in which we unwind tends to use screens, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they ae becoming an even bigger part of our relaxation also. For a number of us, relaxation is associated with seeing movies or tv, all of which is done on a screen, or maybe reading a book, which had managed to avoid the monopolisation of the screen until quite recently. Books are one of the oldest technologies that we still use today, with the book as we know it today being pretty much unchanged for about two thousand years now. Although eBooks may have been sold as the inevitable progression of the book, perhaps having at least one thing in your life that you do away from a screen is reason enough to avoid them. People like the co-founder of the impact investor with a stake in World of Books would probably appreciate the appeal of reading a book without the need for a screen.
So much of our lives now exists online. From our work to our entertainment and our shopping, the internet now touches almost every part of our lives. Although the web has actually absolutely made a great deal of things a lot easier and much more accessible for a great many people, it does take away from some things. Looking for beautiful books in a beautiful little bookshop, for example, is infinitely better than merely striking 'order' when buying them online. Individuals like the co-CEO of the hedge fund that owns Waterstones would probably appreciate the delights of offline shopping in bookshops.
We are often told that innovation is the inescapable development of things, a vital improvement that they would not survive without, but is this in fact accurate? It is a simple myth to buy into, we have all experienced how smart phones have actually made our lives simpler, giving us access to more things than we understand how what to do with, however we likewise know how it has harmed us also. And many things have actually rather stubbornly withstood digitalisation, like books. Although it may have been expected that online books would make their print predecessors a distant memory, that has actually not happened at all, perhaps speaking with the limits of digitalisation and blowing a book-shaped hole in the misconception of technological progress. People like the CEO of the asset manager with a stake in Amazon books might know how books have withstood being technologically updated.