No, Cory, this is the future of bookselling...

The thing that Arthur liked best about owning his own shop was that he could stock whatever he pleased (well, not drugs or guns,of course) and if you didn't like it, you could just shop somewhere else (if you had a prescription or a lisence). So there in the window were four ancient Cluedo sets rescued from a car-boot sale in Sussex; a pair of trousers sewn from a salvaged WWII bivouac tent; a small card advertising the availability of artisinal truffles handmade by a gifted chocolatier in Islington; a brick of Pu'er tea that had been made in Guyana by a Chinese family who'd emigrated a full century previous (back when emigratingwas still legal); and, just as of now, six small, handsomely made books.

The doorbell buzzed and Arthur looked at the monitor, saw a girl, a teenager, with awkward hair and skin and posture and so on. He ignored her.

Security costs were crazy in this neighbourhood, but with all the street people wandering around it was worth every penny just to keep them from pressing their faces up against the window, they’d move her along soon enough.

She buzzed again and Arthur was reaching for the other buzzer, the one that would signal security (what was taking them?) when he saw her eyes in the monitor, staring at the books in window with a real gleam. He buzzed the first door and when she was in the security enclosure he buzzed the second and let her in.

"They're all carrying them in school," she said, pointing to the books.

"Oh," Arthur said, "you go to a good school?" More of an accusation, really.

"On scholarship. My brother had a rubgy scholarship but he broke his ankle and it healed funny, so now it's just me." She looked at the books again and said, "Never thought I'd find one in a shop though. How much?"

Arthur compared the book to his cheat sheet behind the counter. This one had a cover amde from old Hacks tins, resurfaced with a spectral spider-web of rotting Irish lace. the chapters within had a whopping aggregate score of 98%, meaning that the content had been accessed almost every day since it’d been posted. Even before he looked to the price column on his sheet, he knew he was going to have to disappoint her.

"That one's 70 quid, love" he said. He armoured himself for the inevitable shock, disbelief and protestation, but she just hung her head, resigned.

"Figures," she said.

Arthur could tell this was a girl used to disappointment. He ran his fingers down the spines until he found a cheaper one - bound with floppy felt screened with a remixed Victorian woodcut of a woman with tentacles for arms. "This one's got mostly the same text, but I can let you have it for, erm," he looked at the sheet again, thinking about the wholesale price, about his margin. "Call it twenty-five pounds."

She shook her head again, gave him a wry smile. "Still too much, I should have known. It's just the posh kids who've got 'em, not the scholarship kids."

"You could just read it online, you know."

"I try, at the public library, but the lines for readers are so long and every penny I have goes to the readers at the shop. That's why I wanted a real paper book I could keep forever."

Arthur was shocked. "You don't have a reader at home?"

The girl looked at her feet, shifted them, said, "Well, at the moment... we're... it's just my Dad was sick and my mother's job, what with all the other bills... the price of food, and..."

Arthur's finger was back on the security buzzer. "You're not even connected!?"

She looked up sharply. "It's not like we're homeless."

"No," Arthur said. "Not yet."

"I heard," the girl said, "that books used to be paper, that you could buy one cheap – the whole thing all the way to the end - and keep it forever . You didn't have to pay every month to see the next part. Is that true?"

"I don't know," Arthur said, but he knew. He remembered those books. In those days a girl like this could have gone to the library and taken one home for free – not to keep, of course, but to finish to the end. He’d heard stories of people getting stacks of books from the library, sitting in the park and reading them, falling in love them, growing up and buying new editions of them. He’d heard of people who had libraries in their own homes, walls and walls of books they could read any time they wanted – to visit the worlds in the books or just to go back to feel like they did the first time they’d read them.

That all changed, though, with the readers. At first they were bulky and expensive and people didn’t like them but the companies that could deliver the books – or the movies or the music or the news or anything – along wires or even just through the air, they loved the readers. At first they sold the books and the music and the movies but then people just gave them away to all their friends or even people they didn’t even know in other cities, other countries, so the companies stopped that and started making it so that the readers had to be online all the time to work.

The people liked that a lot. Well, not people like this girl’s family with not enough money for the hookup, people who got sick and lost their jobs or didn’t do well enough at school to get a good job. Arthur had heard there were fewer jobs than qualified people, but he doubted that, didn’t sound right. No, all those street people Arthur hated clogging up the neighbourhood, sleeping on the sidewalk, scaring him when he tried to go anywhere, they weren’t connected and it must be their own fault.

Everyone else, though, everyone who mattered, they loved the convenience of the readers – every book ever written right at their fingertips whenever they wanted! What could be better? He couldn’t even remember the last time a book was made, how many years ago that was.

He looked at the girl and said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to go.”

She looked him in the eye and said, “You don’t even care, do you?”

No, he thought, why should I?