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70 Consuming Media

Easter, or to events not named in the calendar, for example, the Nobel Prize for liter-
ature, beginning of term, end of term and the annual sale. In connection with these
events there are established campaigns. Around Christmas, which is the season with
the largest turnover, large gift books with eye-catching covers are arranged in piles on
a platform: novels in hard covers, cookbooks, gardening books and books about inte-
rior design share the space with gaudy illustrated books. For the traditional book sale
in February the shelves are removed and the space is arranged so as to accommodate
the best-selling discount titles. For the summer, pocketbooks and paperback crime
novels are displayed with a sign: ‘Take four, pay for three’.
The pace in the bookshop is much slower than at the newsagent’s. The platforms
and gondolas make it possible to display a large number of titles, arranged according
to genre like the magazines, marked with clear signs on the shelves. But like tobac-
conists, booksellers choose to focus on the latest items, presented here in the form of
top tens, special stands and displays. Similarly, the chain of bookstores chooses to
display many copies of fewer titles, so that presumed best-sellers are displayed in
stacks or on the shelves that cover the pillars in the store. The platforms in particular
help to attract attention to the products and bring them literally close at hand. It is
easy for visitors to look at, touch and read the books; many visitors stay in the store
for a long time and examine titles, hold books, leaf through them, read blurbs and
tables of contents. A bookshop regards the customer as a flâneur, for whom the
process of selection is important. This fact illustrates the place of the bookshop in a
field of tension between different values. On the one hand, there are the economic
values, where turnover, sales and profit are central. On the other hand are the cultural
values that are associated with reading and books in our society. Books are bearers of
a cultural heritage, having for centuries been associated with education of the middle
classes. This accounts for the bookshop’s serene and peaceful atmosphere without
pushy or obtrusive salespeople, in contrast, for example, to the shops where media
hardware is sold.
But in spite of this relative serenity, neither booksellers nor newsagents encourage
any more extensive in-store reading. In shops that sell magazines and newspapers one
can find signs saying, ‘Buy before you read’, but in the bookshop there are no such
signs and some reading is tolerated, but not too much. This is underlined by the
absence of chairs and armchairs, unlike some other bookshops that have developed
to more or less literary salons. But the bookshops in the shopping centre seem
untouched by this trend, probably because of their profile as popular bookshops for
‘common’ people. The antipathy to reading about media products can not only be
explained by the fact that the articles must not look used when they are eventually
sold, but also because the stores want to push consumers forward at different paces
in the selection process toward the final goal – the purchase. The different paces
depend on the way the different shops construct their customers, leading to different
sales strategies. At the tobacconist’s the various products are made available through
a process of continuous weeding among the newspapers and magazines so that the
latest issues are brought to the fore and can easily be seen and picked up in mid stride