Home or Away? (Cecilia Peartree)
These days I often think about the Edinburgh Book Festival, usually with a heavy sigh and a feeling of tremendous nostalgia. The other day, about five minutes after attending an online literary event and still with slightly blurred vision from staring at my phone screen for an hour, I was checking Facebook to see if anything had happened there in the mean-time when I noticed a plea from a researcher asking for people to complete a survey about whether they preferred online or real-life events. Not only do I enjoy filling in surveys, or at least I do when I have time to spare, which I often have at the moment, but having only just experienced an online event I thought I could probably contribute something to their research. Bookshop at the Edinburgh Book Festival I realised as I answered the survey questions that I was in at least two minds about this topic. So many different factors are at play. There's the difficulty of getting to real-life events and of squashing myself into unco...