Kindle to be Banned from UK Book Festival

The Hay Book Festival is kicking off today in this small border town.  A quarter of a million people are expected to attend this year, and if some local booksellers could get their way no Kindle owners would be welcome.

The Daily Mail is reporting that there's a growing movement among Hay area booksellers to ban the Kindle and other ereaders from the Hay Festival. A coalition of local booksellers are blaming the Kindle for the closure of 5 local bookstores in the past year.

The bookstore owners say that Kindle owners are different from other readers in that they walk around like robots, not noticing their surroundings or interacting with other festival participants. (Clearly these booksellers are forgetting about readers like me; I was obliviously walking into street signs, branches, cars, and people long before I bought my first ereader.)

While some might pretend there's a controversy here, this isn't really that much of a story. The booksellers in question have little to do with running the Hay Festival so their protests, as colorful as they might be, will have little effect. What's more, I suspect they know that they cannot actually accomplish their goal. What they're really doing here is generating a spectacle just to draw attention to their bookstores.

That's fine by me, but what they've also done is made themselves look foolish. You see, the iBookstore is listed as a sponsor of the book fair. This raises the obvious question of whether the Kindle itself is so evil that it must banned then why is it okay to read ebooks on your iPhone?

But what's even more amusing is that Google is also a sponsor, and guess what they sell in the UK? eBooks, and they've been selling ebooks there since last year.

I do find it amusing, yes. These booksellers are harping on the evils of the Kindle while ignoring its competition.  If the booksellers really wanted to accomplish something, they might want to focus on the other more serious threats to their existence, including online booksellers as well as the many other activities that people could be doing instead of reading.

When you look at it in proper perspective, these booksellers don't look principled so much as as they look clueless and out of touch. One might as well try to order back the tide.

About Nate Hoffelder (11040 Articles)

Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:

“I’ve been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It’s a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog.”

4 Comments on Kindle to be Banned from UK Book Festival

  1. A coalition of horse & buggy makers is seeking to ban the new fangled automobile from the Great Transportation Expo to be held this month, blaming the automobile for the shutdown of 5 local horse & buggy makers.

  2. Ostrich head…meet sand.

  3. I spent a couple of days in Hay a few years ago. Some of the second-hand bookshops were closed at weekends (when we were there), some were totally disorganised to the point of unusability, and those that were both open and usable tended to be more expensive than a web purchase would have been. I still spent many happy hours in bookshops, but only in passing: I would never go to one in the expectation of finding it open and in possession of the book I want.

  4. Well, disruptive innovation can be seen from two points of view.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


*
https://the-digital-reader.com/2012/06/01/kindle-to-be-banned-at-uk-book-festival/
the-digital-reader.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-47
82480
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:F7SFI4EY5OJDH4RVUFPYY4QS2LUYXA66
<urn:uuid:14b192ec-76df-459d-9cfd-877cba71daf6>
2017-11-25T07:50:33Z
104.28.12.126
text/html
sha1:JCQU73RYCQEVAQQEG3K5YDVJ5QBSTUQ6
<urn:uuid:40832e1e-778c-4a77-803d-b9f62ef1ee5b>
https://the-digital-reader.com/2012/06/01/kindle-to-be-banned-at-uk-book-festival/
length
response
<urn:uuid:4ab350b0-5908-4d33-bd38-b911f991fa13>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-169-205-242.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-47
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf