Atlantis Books, Oia, Santorini, and the triumph of Kindle

My family were on a chilled out vacation in the cliff-top village of Oia, on the Greek island of Santorini, when we discovered one of the world’s great bookshops. Specifically, the tenth best bookshop in the world, as certified by Lonely Planet. Other cities which feature top ten bookshops are London, Paris, San Francisco, Rome, Buenos Aires, Berlin and Beijing. Pattern recognition software would never have completed that list with Oia, Santorini, population 1230, but the editors of Lonely Planet got this one right. Atlantis Books deserves to be on the top ten list. It is almost everything a bookshop should be.



Atlantis Books is lined from floor to ceiling with books, with more books piled up on table tops and benches. It has a two shelves labelled Political Theory, and no airport-style displays featuring the latest John Grisham best seller. The greatest number of books are in English, but it also has shelves of German, French and Greek books. The internal roof is contoured, and supports a paper chandelier. A nook leads up into a cranny, which leads up a twisty chute with poetry stencilled on to the whitewash, which leads up on to a terrace overlooking the caldera, which hosts literary or musical events on summer evenings. It smells like a college library, or a multi-generational family library.

The name Atlantis Books is moist with meaning. Remains of a sophisticated Minoan culture dating back to 1500 BC have been discovered on Santorini. This may well have been the basis for Plato’s writings about Atlantis, about the glorious island civilization which was swallowed by the sea.

The staff at Atlantis Books are great. They are happy smiling youngsters from the USA or the UK who clearly have a college education, love books, and are happy to talk with guests about their shop. Some of the staff sleep in the shop, in neat beds tucked away into little corners. One of them, an English poet wearing a cloth cap and a wispy beard, asked me what I did. “I’m a business executive”, I told him. “You must be a photographer”, he replied, pointing to my Canon DSLR. He was being nice. Poets and photographers fit the Atlantis Books vibe better than executives or lawyers.

I found a book I wanted to buy. It was an autographed copy of a graphic novel called The Corridor, by Sarnath Banerjee. I'd never heard of Sarnath Banerjee, or of contemporary Indian graphic novels, which is great, because the point of browsing in a bookshop is to discover new stuff.

My wife and daughters also picked out books they wanted to buy. We proceeded to the billing counter. For the first time in our long and chatty visit, the staff were nonplussed. They talked among themselves about how to transact a sale. They couldn't get the credit card reader to work, online or offline. We finally paid cash. That struggle to get the credit card reader to work hints at why Atlantis Books, for all its virtues, is not quite everything a bookshop should be. I have a hunch it isn't profitable.

Atlantis Books may not need to be profitable. The gorgeous real estate could make sense as an independent investment. A lot of the books are hand-me-downs, donations from well wishers. I find it easy to imagine the staff are happy to work for a plane ticket, a bed in the bookshop, and a chance to enjoy Santorini through the summer. But the amateur feel of the place, running a bookshop for love rather than for money, connects up with another theme from our vacation: that bookshops selling paper books are not going be around very long. Those that are going to be around are characterful amateur ventures like Atlantis Books, rather than commercial outfits that care about moving merchandise.

We discovered e-books because our daughters packed their own backpacks on this vacation.

Our elder daughter's backpack was seriously heavy. Investigations revealed that this was because it was stuffed full of Enid Blytons and Harry Potters for holiday reading. Carrying this weight on flights was not an option. The negotiated compromise was to download her books onto the Kindle iPad app, which worked beautifully. My daughter discovered how to annotate, and therefore personalize, e-books on Kindle. This format also sorts out the thorny question of archiving (Enid Blytons from my childhood are still around at my mother's place, but they are disintegrating) and of storage (should we get rid of some Dr Seuss to create room for Malory Towers?).

I might be wrong here. People have been predicting the death of the bank branch for twenty years now, with good reason, but there still is no sign that branches are going away. Amazon, Apple, the greedy IPR lobby and captured regulators can still destroy e-books. They will have plenty of opportunity to mess up pricing, technology standards and user rights. But chances are, they won't. Chances are that by the time my children are old enough to explore the Cyclades without their parents, paper books will be quaint, much loved relics from the past; like hand wound wrist watches, Kodachrome slides, fountain pens or vinyl records.