Daily Dose of English 13
Bookstores
Daily Dose of English 13
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about bookstores, stores where you go to buy books, because I really quite like bookstores. I think there's something pretty special, honestly, because they are selling ideas and words and works of art, which is a lot different than many other stores. A lot of stores sell you things to use, goods or services, food, things like that, but there's something special, I guess, about a bookstore, a place full of knowledge and writing. You know that every single one of those books is the work of not only an author, but editors, publishers, people that work in the printing places. I don't know what those are called. But there's so many people that are involved in bringing a book to a shelf that it's pretty impressive and the fact that there are so many books out there. You couldn't read all of the books in the world ever. That would take lifetimes and lifetimes of reading and learning and language learning even because books are written in every language. And there's so much, I guess, power to that in some ways. And I don't go to bookstores that often, honestly, because they're not that common. They're not all over the place. Occasionally I do, but typically if I'm looking for a book specifically. And maybe I should change that because I definitely have good memories about bookstores because I come from a city with one of the largest bookstores in the world. It's not the largest, but it is the largest independent, independently owned new and used bookstore. So there's bigger ones. I think there's a bigger one in like Tokyo or something that is, but it's like just, it's owned by a company rather than just by a family or by a person. And so this really large bookstore is called Powell's Books. And I remember going there fairly often growing up because it's downtown and it's huge. It's like the size, I think it's the size of two city blocks. Like it's two full city US blocks. Like that's very, very large and there's several floors and you need a map to get around. It's not that complicated, but it's so big you need a map to get around. And each of the different rooms are color coded and they typically have a different like genre or focus in each of the rooms. I don't remember any of them off the top of my head, but I remember there's like the colors are like the rose room, the green room, the gold room, and you can go through the different rooms and see just so many books and there are often lots of good deals because they have lots of used books as well as new books. They have whole sections, they have a whole cafe. There's a whole kids section where you can go read with your, with your child and just sit and hang out. There's just so much inside a bookstore that I think is really cool. And then there's also all different sizes of bookstores you can find. Big ones, small ones, ones that are dedicated to a specific kind of book, right? There's also the, the airport bookstores. Every time you go into an airport, there's a little bookstore selling really expensive books. Almost always they're like double the price that the book should be. But that's just how airports work, I guess, right? You can charge whatever you want because there's only one store to buy a book at. And yeah, there's a lot of different kinds of books there, bookstores. And what I'd really like to have is a bookstore that is also like a cafe and it's a spot to go. Almost a place to read, I guess, honestly, if I'm being honest, finding somewhere to just exist and be with the books. Because I don't have enough books. I actually have very few books. It's probably less than 10 because nowadays I read so many books on my phone or on my Kindle because it's just so much more convenient. If I want a book, I can get a book in less than five minutes and have it on my device with my other 70 books that I have or whatever. I don't need to go to the library or go to the bookstore, find the book, realize that it's not in stock or they need to order it and ask and then wait and then go back, right? There's not that whole process for getting a book. And so I end up using digital books way, way more often. They're also more useful for language learning because you can instantly look up a word if you just have, if you put your thumb on the word, it'll bring up the meaning, the definition or even the translation. And so it's just, I can't beat the convenience of reading with digital books. But I do miss being in bookstores because not only do I have good memories about that really large bookstore growing up and going there and getting books and getting cool things and stuff, but also just other bookstores, right? Just the simple Barnes and Noble is a really large chain in the US. There's tons and tons of Barnes and Nobles in like every single city, but they always have space. There's always a sort of a place to go. It doesn't feel like a corporate chain store necessarily, right? If you go into a lot of whatever, business supply stores, right? Office Depot where you go to buy paper or pencils or whatever, right? It's really bright. It's like white light. It doesn't really feel very inviting. But if you have 10 minutes, 20 minutes to kill and you don't really have anything else to do, you can go into a Barnes and Noble and sit down and read a book for a little minute. And it's really nice. I also have good memories of going to smaller towns when I'm just traveling sometimes maybe with my family and finding little bookstores and just seeing what's there to offer. There's often really interesting stuff or you see a cool book cover that just came out really recently and it always inspires me to want to read more and to do more things. And so, yeah, I remember specifically going to a little bookstore when traveling last year at some point. I don't really remember when, but I went into this store and I wanted to look for a book in Spanish because I almost completely read in Spanish nowadays, yeah, pretty much completely read in Spanish. And so I was asking if they had a foreign book section and they did. So kind of surprisingly for a pretty small town and they had mostly books in German, which was odd. They had a lot of books in German and then a few books in Spanish. Nothing that I actually wanted to read, nothing that caught my eye. But there was a weird number of books in German and then a couple of other languages. And I just generally remember that being a nice little experience. I didn't actually even buy anything. I just went into that bookstore and hung out for a little while, 15 minutes or whatever, browsing, perusing, that's a good word. To peruse is to generally just slowly go through like a bookstore and just see what there is. It doesn't necessarily have to be a bookstore, right? It can also be a clothing store or whatever, and you can peruse to see what there is. And speaking of perusing, one of the things that is really nice about the U.S., honestly, yeah, anyway, one of the nice things about the U.S. is the used stuff that you can find in stores like Goodwill or, that's the main one I know, honestly, Goodwill, is usually really, really good. Goodwills typically have a great selection of books, and they're usually very, very cheap. I remember going to Goodwill's fairly often as well growing up, just because there's tons of good stuff for clothes, Halloween costumes. There was one close to my elementary school, and I liked to go every so often afterwards and see what was in the tech section, what electronics they were selling. I remember once I found a keyboard for my computer that I used for like five or six years. I think I spent like $5 on that keyboard. It was a very cheap, simple keyboard, but I used it forever, and finding really nice, simple things, and especially books, because that's something that I think is, you don't really want to spend a lot of money on a book, because you're just going to read it once and then likely not read it again. And so finding a good book for like $2, reading it, and then giving it away, or donating it back to Goodwill is a really nice kind of cycle to have with a book, because, like I said, they are full of knowledge and ideas, and they should be read and shared by ideally as many people as possible. But yeah, that's really all I have to say about bookstores. I think I'd like to spend more time in them, but I currently don't. And so let me know down in the comments, do you have any good bookstores near you? Do you like to go into bookstores to read or to browse, or maybe there's just a good coffee shop in there? I don't know. But anyways, thank you for being here today. I really appreciate you listening. I hope that you enjoyed, and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one.
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