If you want to find more secondhand books, check your local colleges and universities. Some have annual book fairs where books are sold at heavy discounts. I found some gems at such a fair when I went a few years ago. You need to go early though, because others will snatch the best titles if you
don't. I also went there a few weeks ago to drop a load of my old textbooks, some of which are like new. Hopefully, they make their way into hands that will find a use for them.
Anecdotally, I currently have an outstanding book order on Amazon for a title I'm convinced I wouldn't find anywhere in store. The title is 20+ years old and a little niche.
In my teens I nearly wore out my local library’s copy of the Terminator 2 Illustrated Screenplay. In the late 90s, on a whim, I went into a B&N that had just been added to the mall where I worked and placed an order, even though I knew it had been long out of print and the likelihood of it ever showing up was near zero.
Around a year later I got a call that my book was in and I could go pick it up. When I arrived, a pristine, new, old-stock copy was waiting for me as if it were still 1991. I still have that book proudly displayed - both the joy of its contents and its discovery will accompany it for the rest of my life.
eBay, Amazon, Shop Goodwill have made this process immensely easier, but I still find joy and thrill in the random second hand store finds.
I was interested in a book that went for $120 on Amazon; a local shop ordered for me at $80 instead. It took about a week, so maybe a hair longer than Amazon. Oddly, I found the link directly from the publisher.
check your local colleges and universities. Some have annual book fairs where books are sold at heavy discounts.
In Chicago, and many other cities, larger library branches have a little room where the books the library doesn't want anymore end up.
In the case of Chicago, the Harold Washington Library has a room with a table and stacks of books. You grab what you want and put a suggested donation into the box on the wall. Usually about 25¢ a book.
In other cities, I've seen this expanded into entire miniature bookstores. But in those cases, they end up charging second-hand retail prices, which is a shame.
Fine, you pedant, it’s ironic that a textually sympathetic review of a memoir lionizing the virtues of secondhand brick-and-mortar bookstores, while fretting about their continuing viability as a business model, would link to the book on Amazon, a online-only store commonly considered to be the primary disruptor to that business model. Happy?
Amazon is a huge e-commerce site that operates with brutal efficiency. It started out as a book seller but it is now a place you can buy pretty much anything, with zillions of third parties selling merchandise of dubious provenance through them.
As it grew from a book seller to what it is now, Amazon took a huge amount of business away from both the small booksellers that this book discussed in this article is mostly talking about, and the larger chain bookstores that were crushing a lot of those small booksellers underfoot at the time.
Hence, the irony: the first link is to buy a copy of this book about the virtues of small bookstores on Amazon, the company that ate a huge percentage of American retail stores, starting with books.
Work from home / hybrid shift may help? Anecdotally, folks seem to seek more in-person or in-community experiences when they lose some of what they used to get from the in-office experience.
For some folks, there also seems to be a slight shift from prioritizing destination to prioritizing journey, and from efficiency to experience.
These shifts may not be enough to make the business models work for most, but bookstores with good locations and experiences can sell plenty of high-margin food and beverages, and can possibly find new business model edges (subscription?, joint subscriptions w/ other businesses?, event hosting?, classes?).
I have come to value 2nd hand bookstores so much in day to day life that I maintain it as an almost 'must have' when assessing living locations. Great coffee shops are a dime a dozen in reasonably affluent areas, but a good 2nd hand bookshop adds so much warmth and charm to an area.
I don't have any in walking distance from where I live right now, but I'm moving to NYC soon and will aim to correct that. (Shouldn't be too hard, right?)
> Think of what’s happened at the Strand, where a coffee shop recently joined some ground-floor bookshelves and where you can’t adjust your glasses without hitting some Strand-branded merch.
I did notice that when I was there in May. They place was overstuffed and too commercial. I also didn't get a sense of what Deutsch calls the "slow time of the browse" because I was too caught up keeping polite distance from the too-crowded aisles.
The Strand is only worth going to as a tourist attraction (if you’re fully aware of its status as such), or if you need big art books (they’re unmatched in that category).
In NY, I’d say take a look at Left Bank books (rare, old literature, photography, art books - some are even early editions of classics), Codex (little used shop with a fantastic selection), Mercer St Books and Records (basement hole in the wall), Westsider Rare and Used books (an UWS classic), Unnameable Books (good events and a literary selection).
For new books, McNally Jackson is the preferred one for the reading public. Their staff selections are useful and they have a dedicated poetry and chapbook section.
The one true bookstore in nyc is Book Thug Nation in Williamsburg. The best curated selection of used literature I’ve ever come across and a smattering of other stuff too.
That place is fantastic as well, and just so tiny, barely like a big bedroom! It’s also amazing how zany it’s name is, but it really does have a serious collection of used books. I found some film books that studied directors with depth, but had to restrain myself !
I agree on Westsider. However, I always liked the Strand for its collection of history, science, and math books. While Strand can be crowded and touristy, it still has a good collection of books.
The Strand is one of the places/attractions/etc. that it's easy for locals to dump on a bit because it's something popular with tourists. But the reality is that they can be a lot of fun.
The last time I was in NYC, I was really hurting because of not one but two bad hamstrings cause by hockey. I could barely walk--which is not a great combination with NYC. I had some time and took a Circle Line cruise. It was delightful and I hadn't done it since I was a child!
If you end up in Manhattan: Mercer Street Books, Alabaster Bookshop, and Joanne Hendricks Cookbooks are some of my favorites. The latter two aren’t necessarily cheap but have some really cool stuff.
Just curious, why is second hand book stores that important? I imagine that everything worth reading is available on Amazon and rated in Goodreads. I am just curious and hopefully I am totally wrong as well.
For me personally, it’s the experience and atmosphere rather than the availability. There’s also the charm of browsing without looking for anything specific in mind. I know it is possible to be shown a random assortment of books online, but it doesn’t compare with simply walking down the aisles and just scanning over all the titles for what looks interesting.
You can't browse Amazon, it's too in your face trying to make a quick buck.
I just tried browsing Goodreads and it slapped me in the face with a gigantic Please Login Right Now You Terrible Person modal. Not very browsing friendly either, I guess.
There is a charm to browsing a small bookstore. 2nd hand or otherwise. You dawdle in the aisles, meander between sections you'd never think to look at, catch your eye on interesting covers, try the heft of a book, see which ones are long and which are short, the design and the font give you a sense of character, tell you a little about what this book is like to read. You turn it around, read the back to learn more ... there is a spatial component to your search. When you stumble into a book that draws your attention, you're likely surrounded by similar books you might also enjoy.
The experience is distinctly inefficient. Good for when you don't know what you want. Might not even realize what you're in the mood for until you find it.
And somehow you never walk out with fewer than 3 books.
It’s the type of people they attract. It’s the owners who are often very avid readers. It’s the collection of books you find, most of which have had some amount of curation, if only because of limited shelving. They are often very low margin so often they add charm in the same way artists do to a low rent neighborhood.
I imagine that everything worth reading is available on Amazon and rated in Goodreads.
Then you should broaden your imagination.
Amazon and Goodreads have barely a fraction of one percent of the books that were published. And that's just in English.
It's like saying "Anything worth watching is on streaming," even though less than 5% of the world's video content ever made the translation from film to VHS to DVD to streaming. Or paper to records to tape to CD to streaming.
There's a whole vast world of content out there beyond the internet. Once you discover this, it's like taking a pill in The Matrix.
(My metaphor might be off there, as I've never seen The Matrix, but from what I understand from other people's conversations, that should work.)
I understand your metaphor in the sense that The Matrix is a scifi adaptation of the allegory of the cave. The concept that commercial/online bookstores are where items worth finding will be found is like thinking the shadows of the cave are the only thing worth seeing. You are correct, there is so much content there be found, which isn't limited/controlled by what the big market values.
Additionally those are very good points about English and streaming. There are books out there which are not translated and not digitized, which are absolutely worth reading, and will not be found anywhere besides private collections, used bookstores, flea markets, estate sales. Some of these books were originally purchased long ago and/or far away, just because they are not popular enough to be easily found does not mean they are not worh finding.
A friend of my dad is a professional book hound, and he says it amuses him when he sees others who can’t understand what to do with a book that doesn’t have an isbn.
When my wife and I wanted to catalog our modest home library (~1500 books) we were stunned when we discovered that the vast majority of web-based cataloging software assumes that all books have an ISBN. (Or did in 2015 or so). Thankfully LibraryThing does not make that assumption, and is great.
The number of books published annually is somewhere between one million and ten million, depending on how they're counted. Self-published? ebooks? Audiobooks? Etc.
I’ll offer another perspective: human interaction. Good book stores have good staff, helpful other humans that will engage with you and guide you to something you would like.
Computers can fill some, but not all of this role. We are social animals. We are hard wired to feel good when we are in community with other humans, and to (in cases) develop psychosis when deprived of that contact[1].
The price of a book is trivially easy to compare, while the value of social interaction is hard to quantify. Replacing in-person commerce with online shopping because it is less expensive or more convenient may not be as good a deal as it seems.
Just IMO, but with physical books you can open them and inspect the content, this might not be important for literature books but for more technical books you want to see examples. I am not from US and our online book stores do not allow you to electronically browse the books. Review might help, I wanted to buy a programming book for my son (Roblox sutff) and a review told me that the code listings are garbage and there is no actual care in the type setting of the book, now imagine I buy this book at the moment there is no such a reivew(and if the review was wrong then I avoided a good book), with a real store you can see for yourself, the downsides that the book selection might be limited for niche subjects.
Also I think is faster to evaluate the book if you have it in your hands, you can immediately notice if the quality is bad or good, if the fonts are maybe too small so it would be hard to read, if the content feels padded with tons of irrelevant stuff, if you like the art style or language of the author. Is the same like when you want to buy a phone or monitor, if you have it in your face you can imediatly spot things you don't like and see the real dimensions where if you have just some pictures and numbers in your face it is harder.(I bought a watch as gift for someone and when it arrived I was shocked how small it is in reality, there were numbers in the description but numbers felt ok for me at that time)
Having visited many second hand bookstores in different cities, there are absolutely books out there worth reading not available online- soke will never be available online. There are a lot of obscure books out there- old, self-published, or just really niche subjects- which will never be popular or wanted enough to find reproduced digitally.
Besides being an experience in and of themselves (used bookstores are often very unique and individual, sometimes operated by interesting people who do it out of a love of books or history), you can find some real gems and sometimes even terrible unbelievable books of decades past that would never be something you could find in a regular commercial/corporate book shop selling for profit and catering to whatever is on the bestseller list, what critics recommend, and what publishers want to sell.
Besides the experience and obscure books, used bookstores often are the best places to meet interesting people. Some people, myself included, love the atmisphere of these shops- the smell of old books, the piles of otherwise discarded tomes, shelves where you can find books that were once part of collections curated by bibliophiles- some of these books have annotations on them, some of them are on very niche subjects not easily found elsewhere, some so old if you look for information online you won't find anything. I've had and heard some really fascinating conversations in second hand bookshops I don't think I would ever have experienced otherwise. Some of these shops are a place of community, where people post business cards and event posters for things you wouldn't readily find out about easily- some host events in the store itself (discussion groups, games, book clubs, etc). Some have very comfortable atmosphere and welcome people coming to just hang out, no pressure to spend money. Additionally there is the possibility there for you to build a bond with the owners/keepers, who sometimes will bring out books they keep off the shelves just for you.
Some old book shops are absolutely packed with everything from textbooks to catalogues to literature- unsorted treasures waiting to be found. Books with no ISBN, no online presence whatsoever, items that cannot be found otherwise (unless you were looking for them specifically, and even then they would be really difficult to procure). There is a charm to be found in these shops that just cannot be replicated in common bookstores.
Because you don't know what you don't know, and neither does Buy'n'Large. In a second hand bookstore you'll come across things in the same category that are useful and important but don't come up in a recommendation engine because they're not popular. The deeper into a field you go, the more noticeable this is.
Also, the second hand bookstore isn't maintaining a secret police file on every micro-action and momentary impulse you exhibit while inside their property.
This is a thoughtful question. For me, it's the personal contact and supporting a local business. Amazon actively (and knowingly) harms the book trade and ignores the fact that its third-party sellers sell counterfeit items.
Browsing a second-hand book store is just one surprise after another. I've found books I never knew existed, but instantly fell in love with. I whiled away many hours in second hand bookshops when I visited Edinburgh.
When it comes to new books, making a purchase at a local book store can really make a difference. Last year, I wanted to upgrade my ebooks of The Art Of Programming to the print editions. I could buy it from Amazon, but asking my local book store to order in the items was a wonderful experience on so many levels. The cost was a little, but not a significant amount, higher, but it allowed for some great interactions in the shop. Now, I pop in every couple of weeks, have a chat with the owner and get fantastic recommendations.
> I don't have any in walking distance from where I live right now, but I'm moving to NYC soon and will aim to correct that. (Shouldn't be too hard, right?)
Unfortunately, Fox Books put all the small, independent stores out of business.
I know you are making a reference to 1998's "You've Got Mail!", but that movie was (besides being based on the earlier movie 1940's "The Shop Around The Corner" hence Meg Ryan's store, and the Hungarian play that movie was based on), inspired by the story of how NYC's Shakespeare & Co. bookstore was driven out of business by a new Barnes & Noble nearby. That Barnes & Noble has since closed itself.
Wait wait wait. I had to look this up myself: there exists a bookstore chain in New York City and Philly called Shakespeare & Co? And it appears to have no relationship at all with the uberfamous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris? This is a bit like naming your new restaurant chain "The French Laundry". How could they be allowed to do this?
To be fair, even the current Paris-based bookstore of the name isn't the "real" one founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919 (that closed in 1941). I think the various bookstores of the name today do so in honor of Beach's store so they don't really claim ownership of the name.
No, that is not at all fair. This wasn't a cold business decision.
George Whitman, who founded the current Paris bookstore, and Sylvia Beach, who founded the original, were very close friends. She even toyed with reopening her original shop with him, again under the name Shakespeare and Company. Two years after she died, he renamed his bookstore (Le Mistral) to Shakespeare and Company in her memory in 1964, as he thought that's what she would have liked. He also named his only daughter after her. As it happens, the second Shakespeare and Company also became a hub for authors like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and many of the Beats. It's the sister shop of City Lights in San Francisco, with a similar author history. Whitman was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His daughter now runs the store.
So in Paris there were two Shakespeare and Company bookstores, both extremely famous at different critical times in literary history, whose respective owners were very close, and which were both basically set up the same way. I think it's reasonable to say that they're both the "real" Shakespeare and Company. That's a far cry from the NYC situation.
Would also highly recommend the HousingWorks Bookshop in Soho - they have a really incredible selection of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as art books. I am a fan of Book Thug Nation in Williamsburg, Molasses Books in Bushwick, and Mercer St. Books right near Washington Square Park.
I wonder if Gen Z will know book stores that aren’t Barnes & Noble or independents who sell everything from books to socks to chocolate, but still call themselves bookstores.
We'll I do and I'm gen z, although I've inherited that from my mom. If not for her I don't think I would care about bookstores at all. Not a lot of the people I know read books these days, it's been replaced by TV, YouTube, and video games. Not that that's inherently a bad thing (there's plenty of good, thoughtful content and plenty of mediocre, dopamine filled content - just like with books) but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Ultimately I think I spend too much time on these kinds of things anyway, and would rather spend time making something. I tend to find more enjoyment from actively creating rather than passively absorbing.
They'll know nothing about the mildew-stinking catacombs I used to explore. Never know the feeling of finding a bargain, or a book that you couldn't find any information about. Everything is coffee-comfortable, tastefully decorated, and overpriced. Every indie bookstore a chain-in-waiting.
Don't worry too much about Gen Z. They seem to be correcting the mistakes of the Millennial generation, and behave much more like Gen X than their immediate predecessors.
Less obsessed with money. Less vanity. Less self-indulgent. Less naval-gazing.
Everything isn't "me, me, me" with most of the Z's that I've observed.
They're more tolerant. Every disagreement doesn't boil down to "Stop liking things that I don't like." And they don't have as much of a persecution complex as the Millennials.
Gen Z and Gen X are very much alike. Just as Millennials and Boomers are pretty much the same people.
There are several good independent bookstores in Madison, WI, the medium-sized college town near which I live, and I'm happy to say that most seem to be well-supplied with customers who actually buy books, and have not resorted to the shenanigans this article describes.
One of my favorites, Leopold's, does have a small coffee shop that serves the best coffee in town. That's not what makes me love it, though: its small collection is arranged by country (or in some cases region), and it's exquisitely selected. Every time I go in, I find several books that I would never have noticed or thought to search for in a more traditionally-arranged bookstore: Turkish religious wisdom stories, a history of the Russian revolution, a volume of Sholom Aleichem's stories, the autobiography of a woman who lost her family to the Khmer Rouge — it's a treasure of a collection. I expect to keep going back there for a long time.
I wonder if other bookstores could stand out like that by structuring their collections in a way that helps their customers find interesting things they might not otherwise look for. I think — though I'm no expert — that most people go into a bookstore thinking not, "I need to find a copy of X," but "I hope I find something good to read!" A bookstore that solves the second problem connects better with actual customers.
A quibble with the article:
> “Browsing” itself is an agricultural term, he points out, in one of his book’s many divagations, often entertaining but sometimes a bit twee, on the culture and language of bibliophilia: it’s what cows do in a field, and only started to be used to describe reading habits in the nineteenth century.
Cows don't browse; they graze, evenly cutting the omnipresent grass. Goats are browsers, picking bits of what they believe are the tastiest, most nourishing plants, and leaving the ones they don't care for.
The analogy seems to fit goats a little better anyway. And we'd all like to be goats, right? Nobody wants to be a cow. I wonder if the specification of the ruminant was an addition by author of the article, and not really what was originally intended.
> “Books, like the leaves and shrubs known as the browsage, provide ruminant-readers with their nutrients,” Deutsch opines, at his purplest. “What an unparalleled activity it is to browse a bookstore in a state of curiosity and receptivity, chewing one’s intellectual cud!”
Madison has a great small business community in general. I am always really impressed by the number of small, independent establishments of good quality when I go.
I love bookstores (like most people in this thread, I assume) and notice the mtv-ization where they sell more stuff that book people like than actually books (puzzles, games, journals, art supplies).
I wonder if this is a spiral to try to stave off eventual closure or the future where there will be one shelf of books and the rest “book culture.”
Nothing makes me happier than going into a book store and seeing a huge stack of outbound internet sales to be mailed out.
One of the great thing about the physical sites of used-book stores, which I've never seen replicated in an online store, is their ability to surface books you'd never know to look for. It's not just curation, but the accumulation of curation over many years, and the willingness to leave interesting books on the shelves to wait for the right reader.
Great second-hand book stores are riddled with wormholes into past civilizations and cultures, maybe just a few decades old, that no one ever bothered to name or remember, outside the wormhole of the book. So I guess they make the past more discoverable. And by discovering those lost cultures we can understand the trajectory of our culture, its effervescence and loose ends and lost causes. Which is great for understanding our own time.
Rant: American culture seems fascinated with time travel and alien intelligence, as though they were things just out of reach, when in fact, we're surrounded with time travel and alien intelligence that we manage to ignore. The books are the time travel. The ravens/dolphins/dogs/elephants are the alien intelligence.
It’s really interesting - we’ve seemingly given up on curation and discovery on the internet. There’s just too much spam and scam to really make it work. Take your average recipe website: it includes multiple paragraphs of irrelevant “background story” to delay you seeing the recipe for more ad views.
Whereas books and libraries have none of that cruft. If you want to learn something the library (or bookstore) is a much better place - the books don’t come with dynamic ads and affiliate links to encourage you to buy something.
It’s not just with books, either. I think the deliberate inefficiency is a selling point for a lot of brick & mortar stores now. In second hand stores and stores like Home Goods or Five Below you have to sift through a bunch of disorganized crap to maybe find something you didn’t even know you wanted. It’s like loot box shopping, I guess.
I'd just caution being too quick on equating "the Internet" to the sub-section of the Internet consisting of "ad-supported search engines taking you to blog content."
The Internet is much bigger than google.com, and there are a lot of ways to use it outside of that experience.
I absolutely enjoy finding a used bookstore while exploring a new town or city. I can't help but meander through the dusty, over stocked aisles overflowing with old and new books. The personality of the store is not just built from the owner but also the surrounding community and the books they read. Some stores have large science fiction sections; some have larger history sections; and some may even have an actual engineering or computer science section.
During one of my meanderings, I found "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming" (SICP) lying under computer reference books on the top shelf. I got the old rickety foot stool, pulled the book down and found it was in decent shape, so I had to buy it. And yes, I know I can read it for free online.
If anyone is in the San Jose, CA area, check out the Recycle Bookstore. One of my favorites.
Meh, I really dont miss bookstores, and I suspect most people who claim to love them are exaggerating. I dont read as much as I used to, my local library is good and online is much cheaper and convenient. What is cool is second hand books if you can get browse for something interesting cheap that you didn't know you wanted.
I'm glad that these other venues work for you, but don't assume that everyone else values the same experiences as you. Speaking personally, I find that a physical used book store has many practical and aesthetic advantages over an online store. (An example of a practical benefit for me is discovering new writers.)
I know many people who in actuality love and prefer a physical bookstore. This is evinced by many profitable bookstores in my area (both new and used).
I'd chalk it up to an egocentric assumption, because it's not hard to accept people love things. I don't care much for old cars but I understand that for some people it's a huge passion they have a lot of love for and they're not exaggerating when they mention how much it means to them.
Some people (myself included) genuinely love bookstores in general and used bookstores specifically.
It's not an exaggeration, if I lived near a good bookstore I would be there regularly.
My reasoning is that loads of people I meet say they love books and bookstores - but when I go to one of the few bookstores left in my area they're mostly empty, or usually mostly families looking for kids books.
I'm probably one of those people who waxes lyrical about bookstores but don't really find myself in them nowadays. To me it's a special experience tho. I experience them like museums and there are very few left (!!) that are imbued with that character of poetic chaos and serendipity. The only book shops left may indeed only be frequented by the demographics that keep the margins nice and fat. So I suppose there's a hidden bias in your observation.
I read a lot and every day. 90% of my reading has been on my iPad in the last several years because I agree it's just much more convenient. Despite that, I still love the ambiance of a good bookstore.
I'm a constant reader, and I'm doing more reading on my devices, using Kindle and Libby for books that I'm only going to read once. I have way too many books in my house, and I actually don't have enough time left to finish reading them all!
It's also true in new bookstores that by browsing the stacks, you find books you didn't know existed and are interesting. Amazon does a very poor job of that - even the top 100 in a category are not as interesting as the selection in my local small bookstore in the same category. That's because the local bookstore is curated. Amazon is sorted by "popularity".
The Harvard Coop was about the last good technical bookstore in my area, but it's been dumbed down, and now just mostly carries the pop science stuff, like other bookstores.
I haven't been in the MIT Coop since they moved for the second time. They used to be right in the middle of the campus.
>What an unparalleled activity it is to browse a bookstore in a state of curiosity and receptivity, chewing one’s intellectual cud!” This isn’t the cheap, fast-food browse of the scroll but, rather, something more meditative, more nutritious.
>Deutsch’s bookseller is a cross between a curator, rabbi (Deutsch comes from an Orthodox Jewish background), and gardener. “Our work is to select and assemble, making the discordant wilds of bookish inquiry manageable,” he writes.
In other words, a better link aggregator. What does it take to create that depth online?
There's a great story [1] of how established Australian independent bookstore Readings survived the entrance of Borders into the market in the early 2000s.
Borders opened a huge store directly over the street from Readings' flagship store and tried to wage a price war, whilst Readings kept its prices up and redoubled its efforts at providing a great experience to customers.
Since Borders shut down in Australia in 2011, Readings has continued to expand and thrive, now operating seven stores in key locations around Melbourne, but still retaining its small-business, community-focused charm, and still just selling good books to book lovers, as it did when it first opened in the late 1960s.
Plus, small local bookstores have no idea who you are (in general) when you walk in the front door. No tracking codes, no "browsing history" in your back pocket.
You get to have full and total anonymity (even if you're a regular, your path through the store will be yours and yours alone). You can browse the aisles and look at any old book's spine you please, pull it off the shelf and read the inside cover or maybe some employee notes on a card if there are any.
And the next time you come in, that book won't be in the front window since you touched it. You can start the whole process over again.
Have you ever thought that this whole "dream evocation and amplification via text-consumption" thing might be a dead end? I mean, 99.999% of the meaning is coming from your own head anyway. And there is this powerful and toxic illusion of "knowing", which ain't good.
It's basically solipsism-opium. Might be a bad trade.
I would look at it the other way round: Books teach solipsism. How much is that needed for our civilization and future progress? Without book, you have spoken words. Their meaning is also coming from one's head, but civilizations without books aren't that famous.
... you can’t adjust your glasses without hitting some Strand-branded merch
The irony of this statement is all of the ads, plus a pop-up on the website making the criticism. The exact percentage is going to change based on window size, but on my desktop it's about 40% content, 60% ads at best. At worst, disregarding the popup, when the inline ads are shown, 100% of the window is ads.
nothing. physical bookstores and libraries are obsolete. they don't serve a purpose anymore.
the electronic format is superior in every way - full text search, fully customizable/accessible reading experience. ebooks cost nothing to "print", transfer and store, and they don't degrade.
a 500 GB SD card fits 25000 rather large 20 MB pdfs/epubs. a 16 TB HDD fits 800000.
There’s a few areas where paper is vastly superior:
Doesn’t require power to operate
The tactile experience is top notch, and makes for fast seeking in the book
You can sell or lend the book without permission from someone else
Edit: also books don’t have dynamic tracking or affiliate links or scams for getting you to buy something - this is more apropos to websites. Still though, I hear people say that long form is dead and internet video/short form, or even blogs is the way real knowledge is passed on.
I really can’t think of a reply but “LOL”…nothing can replace physical bookstores and libraries in particular are still very important. They provide a place to get books/newspapers/magazines for those who can’t afford an e-reader. Libraries also provide internet access to those who can’t afford it. I hope you go to your local library, get a card, and make use of the services they provide. I think it would be a great experience for you.
When you walk down the quai along the Seine in Paris, there are used book kiosks for kilometers. The bouquinistes have been there for many years and maybe they are the true enduring heart of French values. Americans consume TV like the French read books, at least in the capital. It is no surprise the overall awareness of the population is far more attuned to the realities of a modern world. America has outsourced their perception of the world to megacorporations hell bent on profit. Reading is an ethical act, and it is also a necessary one (we are finding out) for Democracy.
The bouquinistes might conjure up romantic notions of a book-loving French population but the reality is a little more complex. Bouquinistes are regulated and apparently are required to allocate three out of every four boxes of merchandise to books. This apparently is causing them some financial hardship as many are located in areas frequented by non-francophone tourists and, given the choice, many would prefer to sell postcards and the omnipresent models of the Eiffel Tower that everyone takes home with them. [0].
I'm intrigued by all these comments praising second-hand bookstores as I've never been in one myself. My discovery methods are pretty simple and quite targeted.
Could you name some interesting, non-fiction books you've discovered that would be impossible or hard to find in online bookstores?
I love used bookstores and my retail business is right next door to one that I mostly despise. The shelves are literally overflowing and there is no rhyme or reason to shelf organization. The prices are high, which I normally wouldn’t mind because usually it comes with great curation or presentation or a point of view. But this shop has none of those redeeming qualities. The employees also don’t seem to care about reading or books, other than to point out how quickly some categories of books fly off the shelves. It’s all very transactional.
It’s the weirdest experience because I want so badly for it to be like other shops I’ve browsed and loved. I’ve even considered opening my own bookshop down the street to fulfill my desire for a great used book shop in my city. Maybe someday.
Doing a general query here (I won't call it a "poll" since the numbers don't matter):
Do you ever ask a bookstore staffer for recommendations?
I've always preferred to just browse for myself, and maybe read the first few pages. Either I feel like reading it, or I don't. I don't trust someone else to predict which way I'll go.
However, writers of articles like this invariably mention the "knowledgeable staff." I was in a Tucson bookstore near the University and I tried an experiment: I asked for a fiction recommendation. She asked me what books I liked, we talked for a long time, and she came up with "The Orphan Master's Son."
OK, it's a good book, I'm not going to trash it at all. But I just didn't feel like finishing it.
Maybe if I went there all the time and bought a lot of books and they actually got to know me, it would be different.
I'm still trying to get back into reading again, but once at a second-hand bookstore my SO and I overheard the owner talk to another client about a specific series of books and my SO ended up joining the conversation asking about recommendations. IIRC it was a nice chat and she got a couple of good recommendations out of it.
I think as with everything... it depends ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If the person behind the counter is just an employee who has zero or a passing interest in reading, they won't be able to help much.
If the person behind the counter loves reading but doesn't share your interests they may also not be of much help.
Perhaps it's worth asking for a recommendation in a more open-ended way, so that you don't feel awkward not buying it if the book sounds uninteresting.
EDIT: if you're ever in that same bookstore again and see the same employee, you could remind her of the recommendation and mention how you felt about the book. She may have a different book to recommend in that case. Or I guess you could ask someone else - in the end you've learned that this book/type of book is not for you which is just as good to take into account when looking for recommendations ("I liked X, Y and Z but then didn't feel compelled to finish 'The Orphan Master's Son', do you know of a book that I might like?").
I prefer a store that sells both new and old books. The new books are likely to be worthless (if not already today, then before long), but okay, they pay the rent. (ALL of my fav used-only stores are gone.)
There are many books and little time. So 1) most books worth reading will be remembered a decade or a century later, and will be talked and/or written about for a long time. 2) Buying a used book is a risk for the bookstore, and they vet each book that walks in to be sure it's likely to sell.
Most of the books I've read and held onto got past both those filters; I've heard about the book, am interested, and there's still a copy out there.
And so, the store which sells both new and old is the only game in town. Will I ever buy a book online? IFF the place sells used books. Else: interlibrary loan is a great service.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadAnecdotally, I currently have an outstanding book order on Amazon for a title I'm convinced I wouldn't find anywhere in store. The title is 20+ years old and a little niche.
In the “old days“ before Amazon, you would place a custom order at the book store (Not a second-hand book store) and it’d arrive a while later.
Around a year later I got a call that my book was in and I could go pick it up. When I arrived, a pristine, new, old-stock copy was waiting for me as if it were still 1991. I still have that book proudly displayed - both the joy of its contents and its discovery will accompany it for the rest of my life.
eBay, Amazon, Shop Goodwill have made this process immensely easier, but I still find joy and thrill in the random second hand store finds.
I was interested in a book that went for $120 on Amazon; a local shop ordered for me at $80 instead. It took about a week, so maybe a hair longer than Amazon. Oddly, I found the link directly from the publisher.
In Chicago, and many other cities, larger library branches have a little room where the books the library doesn't want anymore end up.
In the case of Chicago, the Harold Washington Library has a room with a table and stacks of books. You grab what you want and put a suggested donation into the box on the wall. Usually about 25¢ a book.
In other cities, I've seen this expanded into entire miniature bookstores. But in those cases, they end up charging second-hand retail prices, which is a shame.
As it grew from a book seller to what it is now, Amazon took a huge amount of business away from both the small booksellers that this book discussed in this article is mostly talking about, and the larger chain bookstores that were crushing a lot of those small booksellers underfoot at the time.
Hence, the irony: the first link is to buy a copy of this book about the virtues of small bookstores on Amazon, the company that ate a huge percentage of American retail stores, starting with books.
For some folks, there also seems to be a slight shift from prioritizing destination to prioritizing journey, and from efficiency to experience.
These shifts may not be enough to make the business models work for most, but bookstores with good locations and experiences can sell plenty of high-margin food and beverages, and can possibly find new business model edges (subscription?, joint subscriptions w/ other businesses?, event hosting?, classes?).
I don't have any in walking distance from where I live right now, but I'm moving to NYC soon and will aim to correct that. (Shouldn't be too hard, right?)
> Think of what’s happened at the Strand, where a coffee shop recently joined some ground-floor bookshelves and where you can’t adjust your glasses without hitting some Strand-branded merch.
I did notice that when I was there in May. They place was overstuffed and too commercial. I also didn't get a sense of what Deutsch calls the "slow time of the browse" because I was too caught up keeping polite distance from the too-crowded aisles.
In NY, I’d say take a look at Left Bank books (rare, old literature, photography, art books - some are even early editions of classics), Codex (little used shop with a fantastic selection), Mercer St Books and Records (basement hole in the wall), Westsider Rare and Used books (an UWS classic), Unnameable Books (good events and a literary selection).
For new books, McNally Jackson is the preferred one for the reading public. Their staff selections are useful and they have a dedicated poetry and chapbook section.
The last time I was in NYC, I was really hurting because of not one but two bad hamstrings cause by hockey. I could barely walk--which is not a great combination with NYC. I had some time and took a Circle Line cruise. It was delightful and I hadn't done it since I was a child!
I just tried browsing Goodreads and it slapped me in the face with a gigantic Please Login Right Now You Terrible Person modal. Not very browsing friendly either, I guess.
There is a charm to browsing a small bookstore. 2nd hand or otherwise. You dawdle in the aisles, meander between sections you'd never think to look at, catch your eye on interesting covers, try the heft of a book, see which ones are long and which are short, the design and the font give you a sense of character, tell you a little about what this book is like to read. You turn it around, read the back to learn more ... there is a spatial component to your search. When you stumble into a book that draws your attention, you're likely surrounded by similar books you might also enjoy.
The experience is distinctly inefficient. Good for when you don't know what you want. Might not even realize what you're in the mood for until you find it.
And somehow you never walk out with fewer than 3 books.
Then you should broaden your imagination.
Amazon and Goodreads have barely a fraction of one percent of the books that were published. And that's just in English.
It's like saying "Anything worth watching is on streaming," even though less than 5% of the world's video content ever made the translation from film to VHS to DVD to streaming. Or paper to records to tape to CD to streaming.
There's a whole vast world of content out there beyond the internet. Once you discover this, it's like taking a pill in The Matrix.
(My metaphor might be off there, as I've never seen The Matrix, but from what I understand from other people's conversations, that should work.)
Additionally those are very good points about English and streaming. There are books out there which are not translated and not digitized, which are absolutely worth reading, and will not be found anywhere besides private collections, used bookstores, flea markets, estate sales. Some of these books were originally purchased long ago and/or far away, just because they are not popular enough to be easily found does not mean they are not worh finding.
Source?
I'd be curious how this compares with LibGen / ZLibrary (about 4--5 million titles).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31604033
Keep in mind that a largish municipal library is on the order of 250-500k items.
The Library of Congress includes ~40 million catalogued books, of which ~360k circulate annually.
Again, the question is what Amazon offers.
Computers can fill some, but not all of this role. We are social animals. We are hard wired to feel good when we are in community with other humans, and to (in cases) develop psychosis when deprived of that contact[1].
The price of a book is trivially easy to compare, while the value of social interaction is hard to quantify. Replacing in-person commerce with online shopping because it is less expensive or more convenient may not be as good a deal as it seems.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8131183/#abs000...
I think if I had “fuck you money” and were to give up tech this would be the perfect hobby business for me.
Also I think is faster to evaluate the book if you have it in your hands, you can immediately notice if the quality is bad or good, if the fonts are maybe too small so it would be hard to read, if the content feels padded with tons of irrelevant stuff, if you like the art style or language of the author. Is the same like when you want to buy a phone or monitor, if you have it in your face you can imediatly spot things you don't like and see the real dimensions where if you have just some pictures and numbers in your face it is harder.(I bought a watch as gift for someone and when it arrived I was shocked how small it is in reality, there were numbers in the description but numbers felt ok for me at that time)
Also I’d suggest checking out a good local bookstore, it’s a whole different and IMO a more wholesome and relaxing experience.
Besides being an experience in and of themselves (used bookstores are often very unique and individual, sometimes operated by interesting people who do it out of a love of books or history), you can find some real gems and sometimes even terrible unbelievable books of decades past that would never be something you could find in a regular commercial/corporate book shop selling for profit and catering to whatever is on the bestseller list, what critics recommend, and what publishers want to sell.
Besides the experience and obscure books, used bookstores often are the best places to meet interesting people. Some people, myself included, love the atmisphere of these shops- the smell of old books, the piles of otherwise discarded tomes, shelves where you can find books that were once part of collections curated by bibliophiles- some of these books have annotations on them, some of them are on very niche subjects not easily found elsewhere, some so old if you look for information online you won't find anything. I've had and heard some really fascinating conversations in second hand bookshops I don't think I would ever have experienced otherwise. Some of these shops are a place of community, where people post business cards and event posters for things you wouldn't readily find out about easily- some host events in the store itself (discussion groups, games, book clubs, etc). Some have very comfortable atmosphere and welcome people coming to just hang out, no pressure to spend money. Additionally there is the possibility there for you to build a bond with the owners/keepers, who sometimes will bring out books they keep off the shelves just for you.
Some old book shops are absolutely packed with everything from textbooks to catalogues to literature- unsorted treasures waiting to be found. Books with no ISBN, no online presence whatsoever, items that cannot be found otherwise (unless you were looking for them specifically, and even then they would be really difficult to procure). There is a charm to be found in these shops that just cannot be replicated in common bookstores.
Also, the second hand bookstore isn't maintaining a secret police file on every micro-action and momentary impulse you exhibit while inside their property.
Browsing a second-hand book store is just one surprise after another. I've found books I never knew existed, but instantly fell in love with. I whiled away many hours in second hand bookshops when I visited Edinburgh.
When it comes to new books, making a purchase at a local book store can really make a difference. Last year, I wanted to upgrade my ebooks of The Art Of Programming to the print editions. I could buy it from Amazon, but asking my local book store to order in the items was a wonderful experience on so many levels. The cost was a little, but not a significant amount, higher, but it allowed for some great interactions in the shop. Now, I pop in every couple of weeks, have a chat with the owner and get fantastic recommendations.
Unfortunately, Fox Books put all the small, independent stores out of business.
George Whitman, who founded the current Paris bookstore, and Sylvia Beach, who founded the original, were very close friends. She even toyed with reopening her original shop with him, again under the name Shakespeare and Company. Two years after she died, he renamed his bookstore (Le Mistral) to Shakespeare and Company in her memory in 1964, as he thought that's what she would have liked. He also named his only daughter after her. As it happens, the second Shakespeare and Company also became a hub for authors like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and many of the Beats. It's the sister shop of City Lights in San Francisco, with a similar author history. Whitman was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His daughter now runs the store.
So in Paris there were two Shakespeare and Company bookstores, both extremely famous at different critical times in literary history, whose respective owners were very close, and which were both basically set up the same way. I think it's reasonable to say that they're both the "real" Shakespeare and Company. That's a far cry from the NYC situation.
Ultimately I think I spend too much time on these kinds of things anyway, and would rather spend time making something. I tend to find more enjoyment from actively creating rather than passively absorbing.
Everything isn't "me, me, me" with most of the Z's that I've observed.
They're more tolerant. Every disagreement doesn't boil down to "Stop liking things that I don't like." And they don't have as much of a persecution complex as the Millennials.
Gen Z and Gen X are very much alike. Just as Millennials and Boomers are pretty much the same people.
One of my favorites, Leopold's, does have a small coffee shop that serves the best coffee in town. That's not what makes me love it, though: its small collection is arranged by country (or in some cases region), and it's exquisitely selected. Every time I go in, I find several books that I would never have noticed or thought to search for in a more traditionally-arranged bookstore: Turkish religious wisdom stories, a history of the Russian revolution, a volume of Sholom Aleichem's stories, the autobiography of a woman who lost her family to the Khmer Rouge — it's a treasure of a collection. I expect to keep going back there for a long time.
I wonder if other bookstores could stand out like that by structuring their collections in a way that helps their customers find interesting things they might not otherwise look for. I think — though I'm no expert — that most people go into a bookstore thinking not, "I need to find a copy of X," but "I hope I find something good to read!" A bookstore that solves the second problem connects better with actual customers.
A quibble with the article:
> “Browsing” itself is an agricultural term, he points out, in one of his book’s many divagations, often entertaining but sometimes a bit twee, on the culture and language of bibliophilia: it’s what cows do in a field, and only started to be used to describe reading habits in the nineteenth century.
Cows don't browse; they graze, evenly cutting the omnipresent grass. Goats are browsers, picking bits of what they believe are the tastiest, most nourishing plants, and leaving the ones they don't care for.
> “Books, like the leaves and shrubs known as the browsage, provide ruminant-readers with their nutrients,” Deutsch opines, at his purplest. “What an unparalleled activity it is to browse a bookstore in a state of curiosity and receptivity, chewing one’s intellectual cud!”
Will report back later--it's hot out now!
E: it was Foulab, so looks like it still is.
I wonder if this is a spiral to try to stave off eventual closure or the future where there will be one shelf of books and the rest “book culture.”
Nothing makes me happier than going into a book store and seeing a huge stack of outbound internet sales to be mailed out.
Great second-hand book stores are riddled with wormholes into past civilizations and cultures, maybe just a few decades old, that no one ever bothered to name or remember, outside the wormhole of the book. So I guess they make the past more discoverable. And by discovering those lost cultures we can understand the trajectory of our culture, its effervescence and loose ends and lost causes. Which is great for understanding our own time.
Rant: American culture seems fascinated with time travel and alien intelligence, as though they were things just out of reach, when in fact, we're surrounded with time travel and alien intelligence that we manage to ignore. The books are the time travel. The ravens/dolphins/dogs/elephants are the alien intelligence.
Whereas books and libraries have none of that cruft. If you want to learn something the library (or bookstore) is a much better place - the books don’t come with dynamic ads and affiliate links to encourage you to buy something.
The Internet is much bigger than google.com, and there are a lot of ways to use it outside of that experience.
During one of my meanderings, I found "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming" (SICP) lying under computer reference books on the top shelf. I got the old rickety foot stool, pulled the book down and found it was in decent shape, so I had to buy it. And yes, I know I can read it for free online.
If anyone is in the San Jose, CA area, check out the Recycle Bookstore. One of my favorites.
I know many people who in actuality love and prefer a physical bookstore. This is evinced by many profitable bookstores in my area (both new and used).
I can't imagine why a person would either think, or write, this sentence. Most people are being honest when they say they enjoy a thing.
By portraying someone who doesn't think the way you do as a bad person (in this case, a liar), this person elevates themselves, in their own mind.
It's pretty much seventh-grade logic.
Some people (myself included) genuinely love bookstores in general and used bookstores specifically. It's not an exaggeration, if I lived near a good bookstore I would be there regularly.
The Harvard Coop was about the last good technical bookstore in my area, but it's been dumbed down, and now just mostly carries the pop science stuff, like other bookstores.
I haven't been in the MIT Coop since they moved for the second time. They used to be right in the middle of the campus.
>Deutsch’s bookseller is a cross between a curator, rabbi (Deutsch comes from an Orthodox Jewish background), and gardener. “Our work is to select and assemble, making the discordant wilds of bookish inquiry manageable,” he writes.
In other words, a better link aggregator. What does it take to create that depth online?
Borders opened a huge store directly over the street from Readings' flagship store and tried to wage a price war, whilst Readings kept its prices up and redoubled its efforts at providing a great experience to customers.
Since Borders shut down in Australia in 2011, Readings has continued to expand and thrive, now operating seven stores in key locations around Melbourne, but still retaining its small-business, community-focused charm, and still just selling good books to book lovers, as it did when it first opened in the late 1960s.
[1] https://rosshoneywill.com/articles/how-mark-rubbo-killed-bor...
You get to have full and total anonymity (even if you're a regular, your path through the store will be yours and yours alone). You can browse the aisles and look at any old book's spine you please, pull it off the shelf and read the inside cover or maybe some employee notes on a card if there are any.
And the next time you come in, that book won't be in the front window since you touched it. You can start the whole process over again.
It's basically solipsism-opium. Might be a bad trade.
the electronic format is superior in every way - full text search, fully customizable/accessible reading experience. ebooks cost nothing to "print", transfer and store, and they don't degrade.
a 500 GB SD card fits 25000 rather large 20 MB pdfs/epubs. a 16 TB HDD fits 800000.
it's over. and that's a good thing.
Doesn’t require power to operate
The tactile experience is top notch, and makes for fast seeking in the book
You can sell or lend the book without permission from someone else
Edit: also books don’t have dynamic tracking or affiliate links or scams for getting you to buy something - this is more apropos to websites. Still though, I hear people say that long form is dead and internet video/short form, or even blogs is the way real knowledge is passed on.
I can give you a copy of any book I own for free
[0] https://publishingperspectives.com/2010/10/paris-seine-side-...
https://www.amazon.com//dp/B0B5ZRBGWP
Could you name some interesting, non-fiction books you've discovered that would be impossible or hard to find in online bookstores?
It’s the weirdest experience because I want so badly for it to be like other shops I’ve browsed and loved. I’ve even considered opening my own bookshop down the street to fulfill my desire for a great used book shop in my city. Maybe someday.
Do you ever ask a bookstore staffer for recommendations?
I've always preferred to just browse for myself, and maybe read the first few pages. Either I feel like reading it, or I don't. I don't trust someone else to predict which way I'll go.
However, writers of articles like this invariably mention the "knowledgeable staff." I was in a Tucson bookstore near the University and I tried an experiment: I asked for a fiction recommendation. She asked me what books I liked, we talked for a long time, and she came up with "The Orphan Master's Son."
OK, it's a good book, I'm not going to trash it at all. But I just didn't feel like finishing it.
Maybe if I went there all the time and bought a lot of books and they actually got to know me, it would be different.
I think as with everything... it depends ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If the person behind the counter is just an employee who has zero or a passing interest in reading, they won't be able to help much.
If the person behind the counter loves reading but doesn't share your interests they may also not be of much help.
Perhaps it's worth asking for a recommendation in a more open-ended way, so that you don't feel awkward not buying it if the book sounds uninteresting.
EDIT: if you're ever in that same bookstore again and see the same employee, you could remind her of the recommendation and mention how you felt about the book. She may have a different book to recommend in that case. Or I guess you could ask someone else - in the end you've learned that this book/type of book is not for you which is just as good to take into account when looking for recommendations ("I liked X, Y and Z but then didn't feel compelled to finish 'The Orphan Master's Son', do you know of a book that I might like?").
There are many books and little time. So 1) most books worth reading will be remembered a decade or a century later, and will be talked and/or written about for a long time. 2) Buying a used book is a risk for the bookstore, and they vet each book that walks in to be sure it's likely to sell.
Most of the books I've read and held onto got past both those filters; I've heard about the book, am interested, and there's still a copy out there.
And so, the store which sells both new and old is the only game in town. Will I ever buy a book online? IFF the place sells used books. Else: interlibrary loan is a great service.