Books, Beans and Candles MS is in an old Birmingham house going up 20th on your way to Vulcan. It’s on the righthand side, just after you pass the “Y-split”. Owners Mitchell and Darby Hagood have been at this location since August 2008, though they’ve been in business for two and a half years. Ever since seeing the sign out front (it starts with the word books!) I’d been trying to find time to stop in and see what it’s all about and finally was able to make it in and get some photos.
The view from the street.
Mitchell Hagood sums up the shop with one word… “metaphysical”. (photos after the jump)
I do a lot of thinking about ebooks and digital media, but Readerville pointed the way to a post by author Jennifer Weiner about something I have never really thought about: does it matter what an author looks like? Their example given is a good one:
the idea that she would likely have reacted differently to the author’s tale of marital woe had she known she was a gorgeous blonde who’d have no trouble finding a new mate.
I have to admit to often deciphering an author’s name as I reach for a book in the bookstore. Especially in the Current Events topic areas. You really do get different points of view from people living in different places, but I never applied to the sympathy and believability side of things.
I’m going to have to go through LibraryThing’s author database and look up all of my authors to see who lives up the image in my mind and who surprises me.
The folks over at the O’Reilly RADAR blog crunched some numbers and churned out some graphs. With the iPhone Apps store about to sell its one billionth app download, the “books” category is by far and wide the largest mover and shaker. It saw 279% growth over the past week and while sporting only 11% of the Apps Store’s total offerings. Granted it’s not as popular as the Games and Entertainment categories and the growth probably has a lot to do with the Kindle App, but with all of the geo-synching-motion-controlling-gesture-detecting-music-blasting features that the iPhone can do… look what all those iPhone owners are wanting to explore on their gadgets… books.
