The shop that moved online

A bookseller in Zamalek has finally put his shop online, and he has done it with great care.

The website looks like the shop. Photographs of each shelf, in the order they stand. A page for the corner with the poetry, another for the stack of old magazines by the door. He has even written out, in a long paragraph, the way he likes customers to wander.

Hardly anyone buys.

The trouble is not the effort. It is the aim. He has tried to rebuild the shop inside a screen, and a screen makes a poor shop. Nobody wanders through a photograph of a shelf. The smell of paper, the bad lighting, the man himself leaning on the counter recommending a novel you had never heard of: none of it survives the move.

What the screen can do, the shop never could. It can send a short note every Thursday with three books he is reading and why. It can let someone in Aswan ask him a question. It can remember, for each regular, what they have already bought.

Every form has its own character. When an idea moves to a new place, a new medium or a new decade, copying the old version exactly feels respectful and feels safe. It usually produces a weaker version of the original, out of place in its new home.

The braver job is to ask what the idea can become here, and to build that, even if the original would not recognise it.