The world has been well and truly caught on the hop by Jeff Bezos’s decision to spend 1% of his personal fortune buying the Washington Post. What does it mean when the founder of Amazon, who once reportedly proclaimed that ‘God did not create the word because they were written on dead trees’ (sic!), begins to show signs of respect for the industry that he appears to be destroying?

Commentators have floated many possible explanations, including Bezos’s fondness for wacky experimentation–he also invests in space travel and various other yet-to-be-found causes. But is this really such a difficult conundrum to crack? Let’s speculate that Bezos loves the newspaper and values its extraordinary journalistic achievements (the greatest of which was its exposure of the Watergate scandal). He guesses that the next two or three decades will witness the successful migration of the great papers to the net. He sees that the current crisis in newspaper journalism is a blip, a birthpang rather than a death-knell. And since he has his finger on the digital pulse, he’s prepared to invest.

All of this is good news for the Post and bad news for anyone who still holds a candle for the idea that the web will be a utopian space which rewrites the rules of communication. The rules will surely change in all kinds of ways, but each passing day brings us new signs that established social structures are moving in on the web, which is already (for good and ill) more heavily policed and more thoroughly commodified than any real-world space. We are witnessing the first phases of the process by which this new technology will become everyday and eventually–dare one say it?–boring.

There was much debate over the weekend about Jane Austen’s turquoise ring, which might be ‘saved for the nation’ if someone can step in with £150,000 to snatch it from the finger of the American Idol-winning singer Kelly Clarkson, who recently bought it at auction. The UK government has placed an export bar on the ring, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey saying: “Jane Austen’s modest lifestyle and her early death mean that objects associated with her of any kind are extremely rare, so I hope that a UK buyer comes forward so this simple but elegant ring can be saved for the nation”.

One way of understanding the debate over the ring would be to see it as an argument between purists and sentimentalists. On one side are those who think that since Jane Austen was a great writer, it is her writings that matter, and all the rest is fluff and fetishism. (Compare Ben Jonson’s chair, in my earlier blogpost below). On the other are those who are fascinated by the writer as much as the writings, who are moved by anything associated with Austen, and who point out that material things play vital parts in her novels. The latter group might be somewhat split by the question of Kelly Clarkson’s emotions–since she is clearly a true Janeite, and it feels wrong to cheat someone of their possessions when you share so many of their sentiments.

I have sympathies for all sides in this argument. My critical training convinces me that it’s the writing that matters, and that biographical mythmaking is often a way of simplifying or avoiding works of literature. But the cultural historian in me knows that things like this ring also matter in all kinds of ways (think of The Merchant of Venice, you po-faced literary critics!), and that the idolization of authors is a force to be reckoned with. My prescription: the American Idol needs to find somewhere in the UK to keep her ring. And perhaps she should think of leaving it to an Austen museum in her will.

Some clever people at the University of Antwerp have discovered that shoppers will change their behaviour if the scent of chocolate is wafted through a bookshop. Apparently, people gravitate towards romances and the cookery section, becoming 3.5 times more likely to look at books in those categories, and 6 times more likely to buy them. But there’s no impact on the sales of crime novels or travel guides.

Clearly this is a research project that might run and run–is it really true, for example, that you are more likely to flog your house if you have brewed a pot of fresh coffee just before the prospective buyers arrive? But the results might also prompt us to reflect on the business of browsing–a word which can denote both open-ended shopping and a certain kind of semi-engaged skim-reading.

Moving through a bookshop we find ourselves browsing in both senses simultaneously, opening ourselves up to the variousness of the fare on offer in the books that we open up, exposing susceptibilities that can easily be swayed by subliminal signals like an unusual choice of font or a strange scent in the air. Browsing is a peculiarly heady experience, and one that keeps on drawing me back to real bookshops with all their smells and textures. Though if I catch myself buying any Mills & Boon, I may have to rethink…