Swift Books is a local bookshop with a mission to create an easy, convenient way for you, our customers, to purchase your books. This mission was born from a desire to bring a local bookshop to Howth and to provide an online platform. We hope to foster community ties woven from reading and a love of books. When life returns to normality we hope to reopen our pop-up bookshop on the West Pier but, in the meantime we decided we should go ahead and open the bookshop online.
Connecting with our readers is our unique selling point. We aim to provide value, quality and friendly service. We welcome a chance to chat to our book lovers through our social media platforms. Our recommended lists are not generated by an algorithm, they are personal: our books are recommended to an individual person—you. We believe that books are essential to a healthy culture. We love the multi-sensory elements of a physical book in our hands. We care about the books we read, the authors who write them and the person who reads them. As Samuel Johnson said, ‘A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.’
We understand that our customers expect our online shopping to be seamless and easily navigated. We offer a first-class browsing service
Ethical commerce is important to us. It is not just a strategy – it is our philosophy. We care about the environment and the future of our planet and our legacy to the next generation, and strive to keep our carbon footprint as low as possible. We are fully committed to reducing our environmental impact across all our business operations and through services we deliver to our customers. Our packaging is made of 100 percent recycled material; most of our books are locally sourced, as are our suppliers, Our aim is to build strong relationships with consumers through a set of shared values. We offer bookshop e-vouchers in order to reduce our carbon footprint and avoid the use of plastic cards. We are happy to provide a paper receipt upon request otherwise we encourage an e-receipt to avoid using paper, and we encourage our customers to bring their own reusable bags and likewise, we are happy to provide a bag to contain books.
"Our aim is to build strong relationships with consumers through a set of shared values."
Reading a travel book can be as transformative as the journey itself. In these times of limited physical travel restrictions, we hope that our destination reading service will allow you to travel within the world of words. Our carefully curated list will open your imagination to new ideas and inspire you to begin planning for the future when travel constraints have been lifted. Travelling involves immersing yourself in different cultures and experiencing how the locals live. Most certainly, it involves exposure to authentic local cuisine and as committed foodies ourselves, we have had immense enjoyment compiling what we consider to be a list of ‘must reads’ for combined travel and food junkies.
For those of you whom English is a second-language, we have a selection of English translation books, allowing you to read your favourite novels of your first language in English. We also provide graded readers. These are books in English, based on original texts but simplified to make it easier for language learners to learn. These readers come in various levels – you let us know if you are a beginner, at intermediate level or higher, what your reading preferences are, and we will compile a list of books tailored to your needs.
Our School Library service ensures that schools are actively conscious of diversity and connectivity within their communities. We offer a core reading library list along with books that celebrate differences, the family, emotional well-being, grief, and positive first experiences. For families who want their children to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights and LGBTQ we provide books that inspire young readers to be active in pursuing a brighter future.With more than 500,000 non-Irish nationals from 200 different countries living in Ireland we feel passionate that schools and libraries should be well stocked with bilingual books. Bilingual books provide children with the opportunity to read and be read to in their stronger language while at the same time learning vocabulary and sentence structure in the second language.
While individual reading offers solace and distraction, we believe group reading builds a community of readers. Our Book Club has moved onto a Zoom platform and continues to allow people to interact with their favourite authors and connect with fellow readers.