Kat Bailey & Nici McCown work at Bookshop Santa Cruz and have noticed over the last week that Walter Isaacson’s new Steve Jobs Biography has not only overtaken the store, but it also seems to be watching them. So they’ve done what any other red-blooded Americans who can access the internet at work would have done and started a Tumblr. It’s called Watched by Steve.
They don’t add captions or context so based on the two pages of photos so far I assume they started taking photos of random spots where the biography appeared to be watching them and then began to get more creative by placing the book across the store. In the last one I include here things start to get a bit meta. They also felt the need to add this to the Tumblr, which is unfortunate, but I’ve found from plenty of experience there will never be a lack of people with an ISP looking to get offended.
(We certainly mean no disrespect with this – it’s been wonderful to have this long-awaited book in our store. We see it as a tribute to a very striking book cover, one that we can’t stop seeing everywhere we go.)
I’d like to think Steve would have seen the fun in this, but that may have depended on the day you caught him. Either way — based on no economic evidence whatsoever — I’m now convinced Tumblrs are the key to saving local bookstores.