"""Eight months out of the year he runs a gas fireplace near the front of his store. He’s got an old leather reading chair near it, where he sits next to piles of books and a long wood end table which acts as his checkout counter."""
Back in the Before Times (Before Amazon), owning a bookstore was something I considered when I retire. Now that retirement is actually near, sadly, I have to let this go. There's simply no future in it anymore.
Bookstores in tourist places seem to do well (otherwise why is there always a bookstore in tourist towns?!). I think people are looking for something to pass the time while sitting in their hotel or gifts to bring home, and they probably aren't going to get Amazon deliveries on vacation.
> Bookstores in tourist places seem to do well (otherwise why is there always a bookstore in tourist towns?!).
Are you sure they do well? Sales might have severely dropped, though those shops might still be coasting off old stock (think about the well-stocked bookshops in the tourist ghettos of Nepal or India: so much of what they are selling was accumulated in the 1990s, and they are still trying to sell it).
Along the same lines, I am traveling at the moment and just recently was chatting with another backpacker about the declining amount of used books for tourists to take in hostels and guesthouses. When a decade ago one might have seen multiple shelves of books for exchange, that phenomenon is disappearing. The fact that most people read on their phones these days, and the other passionate readers are likely to own Kindles, is likely the cause of this.
I wouldn't be so sure. Have you ever been to Powell's in Portland?[0] They seem to consistently liberate me from more cash in one visit than Amazon does in a year.
Powells, in Portland, like The Tattered Cover, in Denver, are multimillion dollar, well established and well loved institutions. I've been to both and absolutely love them, but no newbie could ever attempt to duplicate their success.
Perhaps Portland is already taken, but I'm sure there are other cities where another parent and child [0] could open a bookstore in a warehouse in a rough part of town that ~50 years later becomes a beloved institution. And make no mistake, the impressive main location was NOT in a nice part of town only 20 years ago. That used to be a part of downtown you wanted to avoid after dark.
Underneath Waterloo bridge on London's South Bank is a a regular second hand book store. It has more traffic than God but seems to never sell anything (it always seems a bit like a tatty Airport bookshop selling stock from three years ago.)
But the location - oh man. You could do so much with that pitch - coffee, lounging areas, right next to a dozen restaurants. It's almost a crime it's not properly done.
A perfect testament to all that’s lost, yet cannot be measured, when small, local institutions are replaced by online oligarchs.
Amazon has/had its benefits. For me, it opened the world of English-language books my local bookstore had trouble procuring. But who knows if I had ever developed the wish to read foreign-language books without that bookstore, now gone, that did readings for kids every Saturday afternoon?
Comments like this always bring me back to one article that fundamentally changed how I see HN. The title of the article was 'The World isn't an Engineering Problem', and the top comment was 'the hell it isn't', with everyone else saying we just had to quantify everything... Not everything can be measured, or measured objectively, and that comment (and others like it) really shifted my view of this place and the people who frequent it.
Not in a bad way, as I'm still here and finding good discussions, it just made me a bit more aware
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 59.5 ms ] threadWhen I grow up ...
https://www.bookweb.org/for-the-record
Are you sure they do well? Sales might have severely dropped, though those shops might still be coasting off old stock (think about the well-stocked bookshops in the tourist ghettos of Nepal or India: so much of what they are selling was accumulated in the 1990s, and they are still trying to sell it).
Along the same lines, I am traveling at the moment and just recently was chatting with another backpacker about the declining amount of used books for tourists to take in hostels and guesthouses. When a decade ago one might have seen multiple shelves of books for exchange, that phenomenon is disappearing. The fact that most people read on their phones these days, and the other passionate readers are likely to own Kindles, is likely the cause of this.
[0] https://www.powells.com/
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_Books#20th_century
But the location - oh man. You could do so much with that pitch - coffee, lounging areas, right next to a dozen restaurants. It's almost a crime it's not properly done.
Amazon has/had its benefits. For me, it opened the world of English-language books my local bookstore had trouble procuring. But who knows if I had ever developed the wish to read foreign-language books without that bookstore, now gone, that did readings for kids every Saturday afternoon?
If it can't be measured, most of HN types wont acknowledge it exists.
Not in a bad way, as I'm still here and finding good discussions, it just made me a bit more aware