This familiar passage from Dante’s Inferno might as well become the new slogan of Waterstones, a major UK book retailer that recently garnered major media attention when an American tourist was locked in their Trafalgar Square bookstore after they closed up for the night. While our hapless hero used the Internet in the upstairs section, the staff apparently clocked out, locked up and went home. Unsure of what to do, he eventually tweeted his situation from his smartphone, and was instantly flooded with book recommendations from concerned tweeters who wanted to make sure he had enough quality reading to square him away for the night. Heaven forbid he would end up with something sub-par to read! He became an overnight Twitter sensation and was retweeted more than 12,000 times by the following afternoon. The tourist was freed after a couple of hours, which, unfortunately, he did not use to peruse the length of Fahrenheit 451 or delight in the witty prose of Jonathan Safran Foer. “I people-watched from the window,” he later said in an interview. To each his own. 

Undaunted by one man’s choice to squander his bookstore lock-in time, Waterstones has had the good nature to turn the whole thing into a publicity opportunity. Shortly after the infamous lock-in, they hosted a sleepover at their London Piccadilly store (for volunteers this time – way to step it up, Waterstones). A bookstore in Japan also got in on the fun. So who’s actually signing up for this? Is a night at the bookstore a nightmare or fantasy?

Well, as it turns out, a whole lot of people would have loved to be in the American tourist’s shoes. As a literature nerd myself and someone who loves the traditional brick and mortar form of reading even when travel and convenience sometimes dictate otherwise, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see the power of the written word being continually embraced even in the face of the increasing abundance of competing forms of entertainment.

Keeping the modern reader’s attention is a daunting task.

Indeed, while images, short films and GIFs are becoming more common methods of conveying ideas and emotions, the written word still trumps all other channels of communication. And it’s not going away anytime soon. With the rise of social media, users have only been encouraged to find more clever methods of relating messages and stories in ways that are compatible with our increasingly heightened demands and shortening attention spans.

If you compare the writing of Shakespeare to Dave Eggers and David Sedaris, it’s easy to track the evolution of literature as other forms of entertainment became readily available. People once had the patience to sit through Charles Dickens describing a workhouse for 10 pages because, frankly, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do. But today, readers are always looking for an excuse to put your book down. Contemporary writers are competing not only with other writers, but also with movies, social media and video games. Entertainment options are more varied than ever, and if you want someone to read your book, you’d better be able to hold your own.

Similarly, increasing competition among business markets means that, to go with the book analogy, businesses are required to constantly win over their “readers” again and again. With a plethora of options in any market, attracting the consumer to your particular business and building a loyal customer base is more challenging than ever. But to take a tip from the hundreds of tweeters who said that they would love to be locked in a bookstore overnight, excellently crafted writing still speaks to people today in a way that other forms of communication simply can’t match.

Responding to the constantly rising demands of today’s consumers means snagging them in the first sentence. Like popular contemporary literary writers, businesses must cater to modern interests and challenge the competition with increasingly snappy prose, concise dialogue and effective rhetoric. Think literature is an outdated art? Think again!

Of course, if you really need convincing, you might want to linger in a Waterstones bookstore around closing time. If you’re lucky enough, you just might get locked in. Be sure not to waste this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity on staring out the window; surrounded by centuries’ worth of human thought, I’m sure you could find something to revitalize your faith in the written word.

Elizabeth Proctor is a writer and traveller who loves fishing, chess, camels and the X-Files.