The Roadside book vendor sellers
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I finally got a valuable
and interesting topic after rejection of two topics after rejection of two
dissertation ideas and after a long discussion with my peers and supervision.
My interest in the roadside booksellers of my own district (Keonjhar) led to my
current topic. I would like to thank my Supervisor Padmalochan Sahu and also
HOD of the English department Shaswat Panda both for going through my drafts
and offering valuable suggestions. My heartfelt thanks to those book vendor
sellers to make my work easier. I also got valuable advice from Shaswat sir (Assistant
Prof. of English Literature) about public sphere. Padmalochan sir gave me
advices and helped me to access and collects my materials. I cannot thank him
enough. My parents have been extremely co-operative and supportive during the
writing of this dissertation. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
I shall never forget
the moral support of my friends and my ex- professors: Nikhat maam, Debashree,
Sandeep, Shrestha, and Nadim. And also a special thanks to Padmalochan sir who
believed that I could do my best on this dissertation. I could not proceed and
finish my dissertation without you all. Thank you so much to all.
CONTENT
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER- 1
CHAPTER- 2
CHAPTER- 3
CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
My research thesis is about the roadside book vendors
(sellers), especially on their lives and their role in the public sphere. I
will study on the relationship between roadside booksellers and the reading
public by closely focussing on readers’ interest in different genres and
categories of books (religious, business, informative, mythological, fictional,
biographies, astrological, children’s literature, etc. The main aim of my
research work is to study roadside book vendors in Keonjhar (Odisha) in order
to map the ways in which these small scale ventures shape the literary field in
meaningful ways.
Books are something that makes our life relaxes. They can
help you fall asleep, lower your stress through laughter or tears, provide an
escape from reality, offer exposure to perspectives different from your own.
Here are other ways the practice of reading can make you a better person,
according to science.
·
Reading protects your memory: - A study published in Neurology, the medical journal of
the American Academy of Neurology, suggests that the brain- stimulating
activities such as reading help your brain as you age. The study tested the
memory and thinking ability of 294 people every year for about six years before
their deaths, which on average occurred at age 89.
·
Reading makes you feel happier with yourself and your life: - Josie Billington at the University
of Liverpool surveyed 4,164 adults and found several interesting differences
between people who read regularly and those who do not. Readers reported being
less stressed and less depressed, and having higher levels of self- esteem and greater
ability to cope with challenges.
Book is the medium by which the sellers and public are
connected to each other by a string. In our day to day busy life other than
television and internet, people’s choice is book, magazine or newspaper. If you
go back to the older days when social media was not available, those day people
were busy reading books. But many people could not afford the price so they
choose the roadside booksellers (vendors). The roadside booksellers also come
from poor strata of the society. So, they bring the stock of books from such
publishing house that is low at cost and also rare. From my own experience I
can say it because ones it happened to one of my friend who is also a bookworm.
He got a rare book (History of English Literature) and it was one or two in
stock with the roadside sellers which my friend brought from him. And now if we
search it on bookshops or stores or else on e-book, they are not available.
On
these social media days, people still need books. These books are not
necessarily ‘required’ but are often being read for ‘pleasure’ and are being
read through the roadside book sellers for middle- class Indians. People always
prefers the roadside book vendors, where newspapers and paperbacks are arranged
in checker- board fashion on sidewalkers on a tables, or hanging from metal
clips attached to the back side of the stall (vendors). One may find fiction
titles, especially Indian English novels (along with travel guides, books on
astrology, etc.), which are marketed by these roadside booksellers for the
middle and upper middle- classes and tourists. Roadside book sellers attract
people to come to them to create public sphere. They discuss on the topics and
give opinions of their own, because their opinions also matters. Books are most
faithful of friends. The book that help us most are those that make us think.
Books are the best of things if well used, if abused are the worst. Reading
them is a joy in itself and its benefits cannot be described in words. Books
are the mystery of human creativity. Books increase our focus in life. We
become focused in our life and career goals during reading books. When you
learn, you think less and receive more. Your brain starts working on new words
and belief. Whenever you feel angry, confused, nervous, and negative and
stress, just open and real any practical books, such as poetry, essays,
motivational, investment, business books. You will find and got relief and
become positive, focused, energetic, and creative. And these things are
possible for the booksellers specially the sidewalkers sellers, and roadside
booksellers on a low price. People think booksellers are booksellers because
they love books. And some are. The probability of finding a particular book
increases in relation to the clarity of the store’s focus, and diligence and
shrewdness of the booksellers, and the size of the business. The smallest book
vendor still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the
entire history of television. I love books more. I have studied more closely
the lives of the roadside booksellers (vendors). The reason I love buying books
from a roadside bookseller is they also share their experiences about books and
authors and also novels. “I’m a bookseller because the writing word is
my favourite way to connect with others.”
1.
ON ROADSIDE BOOKSELLERS
A
bookseller is a person who sells book. And yet booksellers do much, and my
focus is on the vendor booksellers. A bookseller is a listener, a supplier and
also a matchmaker. Roadside book sellers are quite and manage their work alone.
The digital age has slowly allowed physical books to be replaced by electronic
books and movies. In the last decade, the decrease in demand for hard copy
books has caused numerous booksellers to pack their bags and go out for
business. Roadside booksellers usually sell paperback books while the ones we
buy at shops are hardback or hardbound books.
When I was in middle school, I distinctly remember being in
a phase of my life where I was amazed at the creation of books. It is a
combination of pages yet it opens the door into a whole new world, which could
only exist in my imagination.
It’s the same as watching a movie but here, I am the director
I decide the mood, the colour, the setup, the characters. Isn’t it fascinating
that even if we all could read the same book but characters in our head could
look totally different?
I think my phase as an avid reader started with a second-hand
Harry Potter book, back then I remembered watching with my friends amazing
fantasy genre movie which was made from a bestseller novel. I had always wanted
to read that novel after watching that spectacular movie and loving each second
of it. So, when I saw that book just sitting there for sale in a Roadside
Bookseller shop, I immediately snatched the deal.
Book collecting is a collecting of books, including seeking,
locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloguing, displaying, storing, and
maintaining whatever books are of the interest to a given collector. The love
of book is often bibliophilia and
someone who loves to read, admire and a person who collect books is
often called a bibliophile but can
also be known as a bibliolater, meaning being overly devoted to books, or a
bookman which term for a person who has a love for books. It can be easy and
inexpensive: there are millions of new and used book, and thousands of
booksellers, including online booksellers such as Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon,
Biblio .com. Books can also be collected in audio format through websites such
as Audible, Google Audiobooks, Librivox, Kobo Audiobooks, and Downpour. But a roadside book vendor collects his books
from the known bookstores. They also collect different genres and categories of
books (religious, business, informative, fictional, mythological, biographies,
and children’s literature).
In
the ancient world, papyri and scrolls (the precursors of the book in codex
form) were collected by both institutions and private individuals. In 1344, the
English bishop Richard de Bury wrote The Philobiblon in which he praised the
love and appreciation of books. Philip the Good brought together a collection
of “about six hundred manuscripts in his possession at the height of his
reign”, which was the largest private collection of his day. With the advent of
the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th
century, which resulted in cheaper and more abundant books and with the contemporaneous
economics, social and political changes of the Renaissance, book collecting
received a great impetus. Jean Gralier,
The Treasurer- General of France, was an important bibliophile and book
collector of this period. Grolier owned a library of 3000 volumes and was known
for his love of the Latin classics and of richly decorated book bindings.
During the Reformation many monastic libraries were broken up, and their
contents often destroyed. There was an English antiquarian reaction to Henry
VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. The commissioners of Edward VI plundered
and stripped university, college, and monastic libraries; so to save books from
being destroyed, those who could, such as Archbishop Matthew Parker (English bishop,
he was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England from 1559 until
his death in 1575) and Sir Robert Cotton (1st Baronet of Conington
Hall in the Parish in Huntingdonshire, England. He was a Member of Parliament
and also founded the Cotton library), began to collect them. By the late 17th
century, millions of printed books were in circulation and auctions devoted to
books began to occur and printed catalogues devoted to books dealers and by
auction houses in Europe and America, leading to a growing popularity of book
collecting with the increasingly literate public. Sir Thomas Phillips
(1792-1872) collected 40,000 printed books and 60,000 manuscripts. His jealous
collecting efforts, which were termed bibliomania by Thomas Frognall Dibdib, resulted
in the preservation of much historical material, particularly manuscript that
would otherwise have been destroyed.
When
I interviewed some of the vendors in my town they said about the collecting of
books was not meant to be easy for them. They have to travel of their own means
to get a bookstore or a printing press to tell them they wanted to buy the
book. But ones it’s done some book vendors have their own means to travel and
the books, but some of them don’t have means of transport of their own so have
to convince and give extra money to ship and also to deliver the books to them.
The roadside book vendors have only that full time job and from that they get
less profit (17,000 – 18,000). Book price generally are low at cost, the price
which is given during the print. People many times prefer the road side book
vendors to buy books because of the cheap price. They sell books in different
categories and genres (religious, business, informative, fictional,
mythological, biographies, children’s literature, specially magazines and
newspapers). Most book vendors settle
themselves near crowded areas such as near temples, market places near fast
food stall, bus stand, schools and colleges. They sell books according to
people’s choice, mostly people chooses magazines, newspapers for those walk at
morning and also the competitive books (which are very low at cost i.e., Rs.
90-200).
While my survey I met with an old man whose age is approximately ninety
but still he sell books for his living of he and his family. He settled himself
at the market place near a temple. When I interviewed him, he said about his
family, his monthly income (Rs. 10,000 – 15,000/-). He is the now the only
earning person as his two daughters got married and left with one younger son
who haven’t completed his studies. He sells almost mythological books (as near
a temple) but also keeps children’s books too. A roadside book seller’s life is
not so easy; they don’t sit in an Air conditioner room to sell books. They have
to attract people to them. They set timing to open the vendor is morning time
till night 11 PM, because that timing people start their day with a newspaper
or a magazine with a cup of tea. Many of the roadside book vendors open tea
stall too in the same stall.
PUBLIC OPINION ON ROADSIDE BOOKSELLERS
(VENDORS):
·
“They
are unacknowledged spreader of power and public sphere. They have hidden power
to create standard public for society”.
·
“Roadside
book sellers one of the major sources to improve everyone’s knowledge. Not only
for student, and institutional education but also each and every individual in
the way”.
·
“They
help everyone from wasting their time, because they have to search in book
stores and libraries”.
From some of these opinions you can understand what the role
is or how roadside booksellers are helpful to the public. Firstly if one looks
from the status point of view then definitely roadside booksellers come from
poor strata of the society. Secondly, for bibliophiles (the person who collects
books), buying books from these booksellers sometimes become a boon because they
are cost-effective and worthwhile too. Roadside bookseller’s struggling is a
great blessing to gain knowledge in different fields through various types
(genres and categories) of book and paper stuffs they have. They make easier
for the people to know about the new books (it can be novels or magazines or
other paper stuff) that get launched in the market before they are available in
the book shops through their decorative way. It’s because sometimes people are
unable to know what’s new in market. But for the roadside book vendors
(sellers) this is possible. For the booksellers people are able to watch these
advertisement and they are attracted and go to the sellers. Much time we find
such unique books that must be available with the roadside sellers (book) with
limited stock and that never come to the bookstores in any ways. Roadside
booksellers do have some rare collection which one may not get in bookshops.
And if you are a bookworm then definitely you will find some ways to find these
roadside sellers to read books. From my experience one of my friends had bought
a book from a roadside bookseller of The History of English literature different
author on 2014. But now that book is not even available in bookstores and not
even in the oldest bookshops. So in our life the roadside booksellers play a
very different important part.
2. PUBLIC SPHERE AND its ROLE
First of all, public sphere is an area in social life where individuals
can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems. Through
that discussion it helps influence political actions. We call this kind of
discussion as public debate because, of view on matters that are of concern to
public often, not always. The term was originally coined by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas who
defined the public sphere as “made up of private people gathered together as a
public and articulating the needs of society with the state”. The public sphere
can be seen as “a theatre in modern societies in which political participation
is enacted through the medium to talk” and “realm of social life in which
public opinion can be formed”. Describing the emergence of the public sphere in the
18th century, Habermas noted that the public realm, or sphere, originally was
"coextensive with public authority",
while "the private sphere comprised
civil society in the narrower sense, that is to say, the realm of
commodity exchange and of social labour". Whereas the
"sphere of public authority" dealt with the state, or realm of the
police, and the ruling class, or the feudal authorities (church, princes
and nobility) the "authentic 'public sphere'", in a political
sense, arose at that time from within the private realm, specifically, in
connection with literary activities, the world of letters. This new public
sphere spanned the public and the private realms, and "through the vehicle
of public opinion it put the state in touch with the needs of
society". "This area is conceptually distinct from the state: it
[is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in
principle be critical of the state. The public sphere is also distinct from the
official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of the
discursive relations, a theatre for debating and deliberating rather than for
buying and selling". These distinctions between "state
apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations...are essential to
democratic theory". The people themselves came to see the public
sphere as a regulatory institution against the authority of the state. The
study of the public sphere centres on the idea of participatory
democracy, and how public opinion becomes
political action.
The ideology of the
public sphere theory is that the government's laws and policies should be
steered by the public sphere and that the only legitimate governments are those
that listen to the public sphere. Democratic governance
rests on the capacity of an opportunity for citizens to engage in enlightened
debate. Much of the debate over the public sphere involves what is
the basic theoretical structure of the public sphere, how information is
deliberated in the public sphere, and what influence the public sphere has over
society. Habermas defines the public sphere as a "society engaged in
critical public debate”.
Conditions of the public sphere are according to Habermas:
·
The formation of public opinion
·
All citizens have access.
·
Conference in unrestricted fashion
(based on the freedom of assembly, the freedom of association, the freedom to
expression and publication of opinions) about matters of general interest,
which implies freedom from economic and political control.
·
Debate over the general rules
governing relations.
Bourgeois public sphere:
Most contemporary conceptualizations of the
public sphere are based on the ideas expressed in Jürgen
Habermas' book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere – An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, which is a translation of his Habilitationsschrift, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit:Untersuchungen
zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. The German term Öffentlichkeit (public sphere) encompasses a
variety of meanings and it implies a spatial concept, the social sites or
arenas where meanings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated, as well as
the collective body constituted by, and in this process, "the
public". The work is still considered the foundation of contemporary
public sphere theories, and most theorists cite it when discussing their own
theories.
A coffeehouse, coffee shop, or cafe is an establishment that
primarily serves coffee of various types, e.g. espresso, latte, and cappuccino. Some
coffeehouse may serve cold drinks, such as iced coffee, iced tea, and other
non-caffeinated beverages.
·
Structural
transformation
The structural
transformation of the public sphere got publicity in the eighteenth
century, the year it’s originated by Jurgen Habermas. He defined public sphere as a
group of private people who joined together forming a “public”. Before the
bourgeois (the middle class) public sphere came representative publicity, which
existed from the middle Ages until eighteenth century. It involved the king
representing himself before an audience; as the King used to take decisions and
was the only public person and others his spectators. During the eighteenth
century the most important feature of the public sphere was the use in
rational-critical debate by the public. After this it got proved that the
public was dominated by the state and also the illegitimate use of power. When
Habermas saw the public sphere is developed out of the private institution of
the family, and he named it the “literary public sphere”, where only art and literature
was discussed for the first time. The entry of public sphere was depended on
one’s education and qualification as a property owner. The role of it was that
people should talk or give their opinions clearly. But in this twenty first
century it comes to the public opinion first. We have many public and social
platforms to discuss our opinions and give suggestions also. Examples -
Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter,etc.
The
work of the influential German political thinker and philosopher Jurgen Habermas and
his ideas about the development of the public sphere are very important and
useful. There is no possible way I can sketch of his supple and deep work here.
Hamermas had his questions to the historians but it may or may not be answered:
how and why did a system of individual rights and democratic rule come out of
the closed political system of the absolute divine rights of kings? He answered
it by distinguishing between public and private- the public sphere is neither
the state nor a crowd, but rather the historically developed “sphere of
non-governmental opinion-making” in his words. But the statement according to
Habermas didn’t exist always. It developed because of the market economy.
Simply can be said, trade and society grew beyond the ability and authority to
govern in the person of a king. Its turning point was eighteenth century development of mercantile economies in northern Europe.
The public sphere is a mental
environment where people engage in interpreting both the reality around them
and the processes which occur there. Such interpretations, in turn, have an
impact on the course of future events and processes. Thus, the public sphere
serves to update people on world events and on the development of society,
whilst the public is able to apply its own attitudes to the shaping of opinions
which form the public sphere, as well as to the actual processes and decisions
involved. In a democracy, a working public sphere is at least as
significant as a country’s gross domestic product; it is a measure of mental
wealth and freedom. The public sphere relies on the premise that society, and
processes and decisions within it, is not only shaped by practical and real
events, but also by opinions, symbolic acts and interactions that occur within
it. A shared and efficient public sphere is a pivotal characteristic of
European public culture. Mature democracies are distinguishable from
pseudo-democracies by an effectively operating public sphere, by the open
display of issues within that field, and by the creative application of
analysed experiences. Decision-making is based not on the transient interests
of arbitrary interest groups and on foreign businesses, but on the common
interests of the society`s members. It is vital for the Estonian public sphere
to develop the capacity to deal with issues of real significance to its entire
people, and promote active discussion of these issues. To that end, it must
employ experts to keep the decision-making processes under public control.
Estonia also needs to develop for a and seek the advice of specialists who are
genuinely able to represent popular interests. For a small country, the
operation of its public sphere is not only a pragmatic but also an
existential need. The necessity to conceptualise and debate over the
functioning of society is vital as there is little scope to squander scarce
human resources on ‘experiments’.
It is in the interest of a democratic society to
keep its public sphere open and operational. In contrast, totalitarian
societies are characterised by the limited scope of their public spheres, and
only persons, texts and interpretations satisfying the interests of the
delimiting authority are being permitted to function in such public spheres. As
a strategy of limiting interpretations, censorship operates in these societies.
The quality of its public sphere has become
recognised as a comparative indicator of a society’s democratic well-being. A
closed society cannot have a wide and efficient public sphere, just as a
democratic society cannot function without one. In the modern world, different
media channels and internet applications increasingly provide broad
opportunities for the operation of the public sphere. Almost since the advent of the Internet, there has been great
interest in analyzing and understanding online communication from the
perspective of public sphere theory. The question of whether the properties of
the Internet and, specifically, social media actually contribute to the public
sphere is the matter of ongoing and somewhat heated scientific debate. The aim
of the article is twofold. First, we propose a hierarchical model of
generalized functions of public sphere. On a theoretical level, we interweave
different strands of thought on the public sphere, and the resulting model is
more inclusive and less rigid than each of those strands on their own. We
identify four generalized functions: identity building, agenda-setting, control
and criticism, and deliberation. The Internet does not contribute equally to
these functions and we evaluate the impact of the Internet on each of these
functions as a diminishing marginal utility. Second, we empirically explore the
plausibility of our model in a global comparative analysis with focus on the
Internet. With the help of macro-level variables which indicate the structural
preconditions for a public sphere, we identify the highest possible function of
the public sphere for each country to which the Internet can potentially
contribute. Based on this approach, future research can be contextualized:
case-study-based research can plausibly articulate expectations regarding the
impact of the Internet on the public sphere. It is hardly surprising that the
Internet has been garnering attention from public sphere scholars for a long
time. The Internet as a network of networks has some inherent technical
properties, such as interactivity, openness, and the potential for equality,
that lend themselves to reflections from a public sphere perspective. In order
to analyze the Internet in such a manner, online communication is often
contrasted to classical mass media, because the latter offer, for the most
part, only a one-way stream of information flow, whereas the Internet holds the
potential for many-to-many communication without some of the limitations of
physical many-to-many communication, such as the need to convene in one
geographical location (Calhoun, 1998). In this line of reasoning, the
Internet evoked images of a possible digital agora early on (Rheingold, 1993b). In recent years, the
interactivity of the Internet is perhaps most prominently on display with
social media (boyd & Ellison, 2007):
if by social media we mean Internet-based applications that allow the creation
and exchange of User Generated Content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010),
then social media represent the most acute and a very immediate form of an
interaction between users who are not merely a passive audience, but active and
interconnected agents.
The concept of the public sphere is
one that is widely recognized and intuitively palpable, but rather difficult to
clearly define and operationalize in empirical terms. While there is little
disagreement over the idea of a public sphere in and of itself, the specific
meaning of that concept is contested. The nature of this disagreement is not
simply one of different authors meaning completely different things when
talking about the “public sphere.” Rather, the contestation over the concept of
the public sphere arises precisely because there is usually a baseline
agreement over its meaning, and given that baseline agreement, disagreements
over the concept’s normative valence as well as its necessary and sufficient
dimensions arise. The public sphere thus displays the typical properties of
an essentially contested concept (Collier, Hidalgo, & Maciuceanu, 2006; Gallie, 1955). What makes the public sphere an
essentially contested concept is the realization that the conceptual
disagreements over the public sphere, deep though they are, can be rational in
nature: if informed and coherent enough arguments are presented,
conceptualizations of the public sphere can reasonably differ from each other
without any of them being necessarily more correct than the others. An overview of more contemporary
strands differing but rational concepts for the public sphere is presented
by Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht (2002a). The authors are interested in what qualities a public
sphere should have in order to “nurture and sustain a vigorous democratic
public life”. The four models the authors identify (representative liberal,
participatory liberal, discursive, and constructionist) differ on the input,
throughput, and output dimensions and originate from different traditions of
normative thought. In part, those different traditions of normative thought are
due to the country- or region-specific political realities, such as the
differences between corporatist and pluralist interest-group participation
(cf. Schmitter, 1974 for an elaboration on
corporatism and pluralism).
Impact
of the Internet
In
the early days of the Internet, Rheingold
(1993a) noted that online communities “might be something entirely
new in the realm of social contracts, but . . . they are in part a response to
the hunger for community that has followed the disintegration of traditional
communities around the world”. Papacharissi
(2002) and Dahlgren
(2005) also emphasize identity building in the online
environment. On this level, the public sphere is highly fragmented and far from
ideal, but it might help people to “cultivate a collective identity” (Dahlgren,
2005,). The identity building function of the Internet is especially
relevant in authoritarian countries. For example, Yang
(2003) stresses identity building as a main function of a virtual
public sphere in the Chinese context.
Clearly,
then, the Internet has a potential impact on identity building. However, that
impact will be of medium magnitude, because it is very much dependent on the
availability of the Internet. If only a small fraction of the people has access
to the Internet and engages in online communication, a collective identity,
logically, does not form.
3. BOOKSELLERS AND READERS
Firstly, what is a book and how is it helpful? A book is a medium for
recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of
many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and
protected by a cover. Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is
the retail and disturbing end of the publishing process. People who engage in
bookselling are called booksellers, book dealers, book people, and book
men/women. There are many types of booksellers, and each has its parameters of
the types of books it carries because it knows what its regular customers will
buy. People read books and enjoy it. The booksellers are such medium by which
people are connected to books and other news materials. Aside from a shared book, no two readers are
alike. Some people stick to one genre
while others spread the love; a lot of people are faithful to physical books
but there are some who skim the books and others who underline their favourite
quotes. The bottom line is, there are certain types of readers everyone knows.
Go to the library, bookstores or roadside book vendors and you will see readers
of every kind. From the bookworms who are trying to stay on top of recent
booksellers to those who are loyal to a small group of authors, each one has
their own preferences habits and quirks. If you are trying to decide what kind
of reader someone is, ask them about they are currently reading, and you will
be able to figure it out in no time.
Readers come in all different shapes, size and literary preferences, but
here the 13 kinds of readers that everybody knows. Followings are some kind of the readers:
Series Junkies: - There are those
readers who can’t bear the idea of standalone novels because they can only
really get into reading when they have an entire series to dive into. They love
binge reading, and their favourite bookish hobby is waiting at midnight release
parties. When their favourite series ends, they’re more likely to reread it
then they are to pick up a book without at least one sequel.
·
The
Polygamist Reader: - You might have trouble keeping track of more than one
story at once, but there is a certain type of reader who loves to juggle
multiple books at once. Their nightstand is like your television queue- full of
things you are part of the way through covering every kind of genre. They like
to keep things interesting, and multitasking is their most beloved trait.
·
Literary
snobs: - Everyone knows that person who only reads “high brow literature”.
They’d rather pour over Proust translations than pick up a romantic paperback,
or worse, a young adult novel- gasp. They are above that kind of reading.
·
The
Re- Readers: - While some people are thrilled at the prospect of a new book,
for others, nothing could be worse than leaving their reading comfort zone for
the unknown. These are the re- readers, the people who like what they knew and
rather re- read Harry Potter for the umpteenth time than dare visit “New
Release” section of Amazon.
·
Non-
Fiction: - All readers love getting lost in a good book, but some people prefer
the stories grounded in facts. They love reading something that will teach them
something, whether it be a historical book, a biography, or a collection of
essays. They know that real life is more interesting than fiction.
·
Fiction
Fanatics: - On the other side of the aisle fans, the readers who are in it for
the imagination, make believe, and fictional characters. They didn’t know why
people read notification, because to them, the real stories are the ones
invented in the minds of great fiction authors.
Most readers will say that book is always better than their
adaptations, but there are some readers who like seeing the movie before
reading the original book. Whether they like picturing the actors when they
read or just prefer watching surprises unfold over reading about them, movie
watchers make their reading lists based on film releases, not the other way
around like other readers do. Readers animate texts. They transform books from
objects to energy through the leaps, connections, moods, associations, and more
evoked by static print on the page.
“Harry Potter is the best book of all times.”
Perhaps the most common book reader type, the fad reader
reads what other people are reading because other people are reading it. There
are a lot of these folks out there, in mob numbers. Often identifiable by
Gryffiindor crop tops and Mockingjay effusive about the well known texts they
pick up, even though the books themselves are less than.....literary. Yes, let’s get this out in the open:
certain books, which shall henceforth get named and shamed – Harry Potter,
Twilight, The Hunger Games, anything by James Patterson or Sandra Brown, you
get the point succeed through popular magnetism, and become “great books’
simply through the sheer number of people reading them. The bandwagon
effect happens across mediums, from championship sports teams, to blockbuster
movies, but it’s a particularly problematic phenomenon in the literary realm because of the “opportunity cost” of
purchasing and sharing a bestseller instead of a truly literary text.
“Don’t touch that.”
If you always read a book’s “Introduction” at the end, or you
must finish a novel once you start it, or you would not under any condition
underline your copy of Infinite Jest,
or you have to read every single end note and “Acknowledge,” you’re probably a
neurotic reader. This type of reader has very specific rules for the act of
reading and the maintenance of their personal book collection. From no
dog-ears, to highlighting only in green, to organizing their shelves according
to author’s birthplace, to refusing to lend books lest the borrower lick their
thumb lasciviously when turning pages, the neurotic book reader is preposterous
to others, but perfectly rational to themselves(I’m one of them). After all,
each of our criterions has both rhyme and reason- if I’m already seven pages
into a book, I can’t undo that lost time, so I might as well continue through
the final line. However, despite our quirks, neurotic book readers tend to be
hardcore proponents of physical books and engaged reading experiences- and in
an age of binary code letters and fragmented perusals of the written word,
that’s a win in my book.
“It was okay, but I really think it could have been better.”
I will be the first to admit that I’m a bit of a literary
snob, but it’s with well-founded reason: I’ve long witnessed excellent texts
sit unread on bookstore and library shelves, or fail to even get published at
all, while twaddle gets eaten up and gushed about like it’s the most luminous
writing. As such, my goal with this chapter is to get all book reader types to
recognize and enjoy exquisite writing- which is out there in a abundance, but
which just isn’t engaged with nearly as much as it should be.
“I’m in – between books.”
Some people just don’t like reading. Actually, let me
rephrase that: most people hate
reading. It’s quite disheartening, because if you’ve had the privilege
of an education in literacy and you are able to read, there’s really no excuse
for you to not be occasionally picking up a book. It comes down to simple
laziness: reading requires active thinking, and people don’t like to use their
brains. There’s also another type of non-reader: the person who says they love
reading, but who reads zilch. These folks are everywhere, (and their presence
could lead us into thinking, on this list is more attractive, but we’re smart
enough to realize than relative allure is an illusion created by contrast)
reaping the intellectual countenance afforded by readership, without actually
taking the time to interact with texts.
“People don’t read enough literature, and its real shame. But
I love reading- anything and everything except poetry.”
The poor state of poetry as a market suggest that many people
fall under this category of book readers: exclusively fiction lovers. It’s hard
enough to get people to read anything at all, but there’s something about
poetry that’s off- putting to the general public readership. Once again, people
like the idea of poetry- a succinct piece of writing that evokes an emotional
response- but when it comes to actually engaging with anything beyond the
results for “best short poems about life,” they don’t. Good poetry is
inescapably vivid, tendering tuber sentences minced into aromatic nuggets that
conjure up the cosmos, that evoke the amoeba, that draw the eye to the glint of
the web in the window. A good poem is a linguistic “ship in a bottle,” with
each fiber of the rigging, and all the wail of the sirens, and the water’s wet
whisper wending its way into the living room- all palpable within the
transparent vessel and transforming the space around it. But, folks don’t like
that. Perhaps poetry makes them feel too vulnerable to the insistence of this
is existence. Even a lot of poets don’t want to read poetry, except their own.
So, instead, readers tend to stick to the safe terrain of prose- prose with its
predictable sentences, it’s easy division into chapters, its investigation of
daily phenomenon via citations and footnotes.
“The author used too much imagery- I would have written the
scene like this....”
Writers are also inherently editors, and every piece of text
is susceptible to their critique. Often, a writer’s commentary can illuminate a
text’s weaknesses because they can see through the content to the compositional
process. Just as often, writers disagree with a text simply because it isn’t
written exactly like they’d write it- but their version is not an improvement.
Writers can be some of the best readers- only when we truck our egos back into
our pockets and consider the text from an objective standpoint, and not from
vantage of our own little desk with our Venn diagram of coffee strains and our
favourite pens and our personal rituals.
“I read so much in college; I’m just giving my brain a
break.”
The best reading and critical is thinking taking place right
now at higher learning institution around the world. This very second,
thousands of students delirious from late nights at the local pub are scrunched
in hard chairs, scouring textbooks, reading Romeo
and Juliet for the eleventh time (and somehow discovering new things about
that dynamics text), and trying to decipher their professors’ instructions.
Whether you like it or not, going to college forces you to read- if you ever
want to graduate – regardless of your major. And caps thrown, diplomas hung,
fall begun again but this time far from any campus- you suddenly don’t read.
After graduation, the college book reader types disconnect themselves from
literature. When there’s no homework, it’s surprisingly easy to not pick up a
book with the excuse that you’ve already paid your mental dues over 4 long
years (let’s hope it didn’t take much longer). Most college book readers suffer
a literary boomerang effect: they imbibe so much text during their schooling
that they end up taking a permanent sabbatical from reading once they pop out
into the un-academic world. A rare few recover, lured back into the literary
dimension by a really good book they picked up, but most of you all just don’t
read anymore- in some small corner of yourselves, recognizing this loss, but
more often, but more often, believing yourselves fulfilled by your careers.
“Did you read that brilliant Tweet? OMG I love how he
writes.”
Most of us have morphed into digital readers to some extent,
since well- night all of us have cell phones, and many will be staring at it
now. But for the holistically digital reader, online content constitutes their
entire reading diet. This includes Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Instagram
captions, internet news articles and their comments sections
CONCLUSION
This dissertation
has elaborately discussed the life of roadside booksellers (vendor) of specially
my district Keonjhar, the history of bookselling and also booksellers. I also
discussed more about how a bookseller creates public sphere and the concept of
public sphere. Mostly focusing on the background of roadside booksellers. Their
livelihood is tough or easy. I interview some of them and clarified more on it.
To understand the
notion ‘roadside booksellers’, I have discussed other related important
concepts clearly in the first chapter. Roadside bookseller’s struggling is a
great blessing to gain knowledge in different fields through various genres and
categories of books. Secondly, for bibliophiles, buying books from these
booksellers sometimes become a boon because they are cost- effective and
worthwhile too. We should give them to respect and also support them for this
great job so that they can bring more books for us. For this reason, I take
this concept to discuss in my first chapter.
Public sphere is the
discussion of a group of people on some important social issues and try to find
solutions to problems. As I discussed on my second chapter what exactly is
public sphere, who made it possible first and also its role. In the 18th
century, Jurgen Habermas coined the term public sphere. Also elaborated with
the conditions and concept in other countries also discussed here.
The third chapter is
about the types of readers and booksellers. Bookselling has become passion and
reading is a quality. A reader always searches a silent place, where he/she can
read, amny readers are travel readers (only travel in search of books). And
this is possible for the booksellers out there. They bring amazing books for
the readers and mainly for the middle class people who can’t afford internet.
So, lastly I conclude my dissertation by saying everybody has
different life experience which they shared and I succeeded in completing this
dissertation. I am bookworm too; mostly buy books from pavement and roadside
book vendor sellers. The reason behind this is nothing but low at cost and also
amazing and unique book collection they have. Roadside book vendor sellers make
their vendor so attractive and eye- catching settling all the amazing
biographies and other books that if someone go to put an eye on his vendor then
he/she might buy one to two books. This is because they get such books which
are not available on stores.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Behera, Niranjan. “Livelihood of Roadside Book Vendor
Sellers”. Soumya Pani. 2021 (a roadside book seller, Masjhid chawk, Keonjhar)
Bourdieu, Pierre. Key
Concepts, 2008-10. 4 Saddler Street, Durham: Acumen Publication, 2008.
(E-book)
Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books, trans. Lydia G.
Cochrane. California, USA: Standford University Press, USA, 1994. (Web)
Darnton, Robert. The
Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, 2009. 250 West, 57th
Street, New York: Public Affairs, 2009 (E-book)
Sadana, Rashmi. Reading
Delhi: Englishwallahs, Hindiwallahs, and the Politics of Language and Literary
Production, 2003. University of Califonia, Berkeley, 2003 (published
dissertation)
https:// www.sparknotes.com/ philosophy/ public/ summary/ (web)
https:// www.bustleby.com/
essay/Descriptive-Essay-On-The-Bookstore- FJJPQCMXUR (web)
https:// www.bustle.com/ article /
166488-13-types-of-readers-everyone-knows-because-we-arent-all-alike (web)
https://bookstr.com/ article/9-types-of-readers-you-definitely-know/
(web)
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_ sphere (web)
Do write often
ReplyDeleteWell Written !! Applause!! ❤️
ReplyDeleteLoved it!!
ReplyDeleteThank you everyone for being supportive and do share 😊
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