Welcome to the Book Stop!

I always wanted to run a bookstore.  For years I thought about buying a little used bookstore, adding a coffee counter and a great section of comfy chairs and a reading area for kids.  But I was never daring enough to take the leap.  Then last year, I bought a Kindle.  And now I barely read paper books any more — so what does that mean for bookstores?

I also always wanted to blog.  Well, I can’t say always, since I’ve only come to understand in recent years what a blog is and how it works.  But I’ve always wanted to write.  And my husband’s suggestion was to write about what I love.  So my goal is to create a virtual “bookstore” — a place to post reviews, news about e-readers, favorite bookstores, and just generally talk about books.

I know that a bookstore’s purpose is selling books.  But I worked in a college-town used bookstore for four years, and I can tell you it’s about more than just selling books.  It’s about making good recommendations, knowing the customer, and knowing that when someone walks in looking for “that book that a guy wrote and then died and his mom published the transcript” he’s probably looking for “Confederacy of Dunces.”

Because that’s what a bookstore is to me.  And because we can’t all talk about books with the people in our lives.  And because some of us — and you know who you are — can talk about what we read for hours.