Does it matter if physical bookstores disappear?

The disappearance of physical bookstores is frequently mentioned as one of the horrors coming soon to the book world, but there never seems to be much analysis of why this matters. Do you care if physical bookstores disappear? Personally, I find that already I don't have much need for them; I can get the books I want from Amazon or other online merchants, and I can find out about books to read on LibraryThing.

My only concern is whether one company (i.e., Amazon) will gain too much power and use it to do bad things. Will they start pulling all sorts of books that are protested by noisy interest groups? Will they hand over our book-purchasing histories to anyone who asks? Etc.

In general, though, I can easily imagine reaching a point when I just don't need physical bookstores, so that's one aspect of the future that I'm not worried about.

It absolutely matters.

I have to be able to browse. I have to be able to be walking down an aisle and get intrigued by a cover or a title, to be able to say, "hey! there's a new book by author X! I didn't know she had a new one out." I have to be able to pick up the book, and see how its bound, and feel the paper, and read a bit, jumping around in the book, to see if I like it. I need to check out the index and the illustrations. I need to be able to walk by the store and see something interesting in the window. I need to be able to say to myself, "I feel like there's nothing on my TBR pile that I want to read tonight. I think I'll stop by Seminary Co-op and see what's new." I want to browse their Front Table.

I need physical bookstores for the same reason that I mourn the loss of video rental stores. I need serendipity and spontaneity in my life. I've lost it as regards film watching, and I don't want to lose it with my reading life.

ibid, except for that Seminary thing...

> 3

I bet you'd love Seminary Co-op!

Personally, it would not change my reading/book buying habits at all if I was no longer able to buy from a physical book store. Due to the insane margins on Australian books, 95% of my books are purchased online - most of the books I've read recently I've obtained from Project Gutenberg.

I already pretty much live without a physical bookstore. The closest one is a 40 minute drive away, so I only go one or twice a year. If it closed I'd barely notice. I've relied on Amazon, B&N.com, BookMooch, and the local library for years without incident.

Hmmn. I want to say it matters, but my habits don't support it (though that may change as kids grow up / leave the house).

Of course, not everyone has my reading / book culture habits, and I think it's important to our culture that there be a place where people can share their knowledge & interests, and gain from the same of others. Though I don't have numbers to back that up.

Beyond that: I feel safe saying it matters to me for sentimental reasons. I want there to be a place to browse books, physical books, and ephemera, and appreciate the inventories of shops defined by more than the current season's titles. Even if I only take advantage of it a couple times of year.

Book Row in NYC mostly disappeared. Strand remains. Many have fond nostalgic memories of it. Did the book lovers it served miss it? Sure. Were those customers left bereft of books and places to acquire them? Hardly. A couple of clicks and a credit card would bring books from almost any corner of the world. Some of the Book Row owners moved online by choice. I remember one of them calling his B&M store a ball and chain. He was happy to close it. Others were chased out by high rents and didn't really want to close up shop. However, whatever the reasons, Book Row is no more.

I'm not a bookseller but I have sold some books I no longer wanted to own. Many of them went to NYC.

>2 lilithcat: Do you find that you can make serendipitous book discoveries on LT?

More generally, should LT be thinking now about replacing various things that we expect will be lost with the demise of bookstores, at least to the extent that the online experience can replace the physical experience? There could certainly be improvements in browsing books; just showing more covers on the work recommendation page would be a good first step.

I think it would be a very sad day if physical bookstores disappeared and the only way to purchase books was through online merchants. I have never purchased a book online, but where I live plays a large part in that - I have access to over half a dozen new and used bookstores as well as the central branch of my local library within easy walking distance from home. Like lilithcat, a relaxing day for me is to roam aisles of books. If I were to wake up one morning to find that all the bookstores were gone... .well, that is just a horrifying thought!

Online merchants serve a great purpose, there is no doubt about that, but I cringe at the possibility of a monopoly or near-monopoly where only one or two merchants are conducting business and calling the shots on what products they carry and for what price.

It would be a shame not to have the independent bookshop in our town, but do they really expect most of us to pay up to 50% more than we would if we bought the same book online?

As TineOliver said in 5 above: Book prices here in Australia are insane.

Australian bookshops have only themselves to blame if they have to close.

I would be devastated not to have physical bookstores.
#11, they expect customers to pay list so they can afford to stay open. they operate on a different economy of scale than amazon and charge what they charge because they can't afford to discount heavily. I agree that shopping indie is often a middle class luxury but I also think that people need to be honest about what they can really afford, buy indie when they can if they care about indie bookstores, and vote with their dollars for the kind of book future they want.

I should clarify that I have access to plenty of good bookstores as well. But it still seems that I'm less and less likely to find something I really want there. After tracking my acquisitions last year, I found that the books purchased on a whim at the store were the ones most likely to sit on the shelf unread, and I just don't need more books like that. So, while I still go to bookstores regularly, I've become increasingly unlikely to buy anything.

I agree. Price is an important factor and I am stunned that book prices are so high in Australia.

Thrin - Am I correct that your independent bookshop has a monopoly, as the only physical bookstore in your town? I think they need a refresher in the basic economic principle of supply and demand.....

>14 lkernagh: Am I correct that your independent bookshop has a monopoly, as the only physical bookstore in your town?

That's an incorrect use of the word "monopoly." There may not be other bookstores in the town, but there are no doubt other places that sell books. And in fact, no physical bookstore can be said to have a monopoly in the age of the Internet.

I would be beyond devastated to see the demise of the independent bookstore. Mind you, I work in the indie bookselling industry, so I'm naturally biased. But I also grew into my bibliophilia hanging out in (and haunting) new and used bookshops. They, and the people who ran them, had a huge impact in the kind of reader and booklover I am today.

I think that as a rule, savvy booklovers used to the Internet prefer to shop/research online because it is so easy to find what you are looking for. What is NOT easy, however, is to shop online when you don't know what you are looking for. It is hard to "wander" in an online bookshop. And hard to trust the advice of an online algorithm when you are, say, needing to find presents for your twelve year old nephew and you don't know anything about middle grade fiction or what he likes to read.

Then too, online shops make it almost impossible for a book to have a visual impact, since all jacket images are basically the same--the coffee table photography book has the same presence as the baby board book and the new thriller and the paperback release.

And hard to trust the advice of an online algorithm when you are, say, needing to find presents for your twelve year old nephew and you don't know anything about middle grade fiction or what he likes to read.

There are real people online too, not just algorithms! ;)

>16 _Zoe_:

Admit it! You're an algorithm created by Tim & Co to keep Talk interesting. ;-)

:D

I would miss physical bookstores much less than physical books, but they're still valuable to me. I enjoy browsing and opening the book to a random page for a more realistic sample of what I'm buying. I do tend to read more nonfiction than fiction, and aspects such as page layout, footnotes, etc. in the middle of the book give good clues about how the book fits my interest. Amazon's "search inside" function not infrequently only includes the first chapter, which in most cases is pretty useless since it's so general. Google snippets are better spread through a book and more helpful for my purposes. For certain types of books, the physical feel of the paper and aspects of the typography matter, and you can't replicate that sort of thing online. For other types of books, I anticipate spreading more than one open at a time and cross-referencing as I type on my laptop; how easy it is to keep the book "flat" might matter in this context and I can't imagine any standard terminology for this aspect, although I suspect book-binding experts could suggest elements to look for.

Serendipity in browsing matters, too. I do sometimes know what I want going in, but this is the exception rather than the rule. I'm no longer within easy walking distance of a library or bookstore, and I've missed that a lot. There is some value in the filtering whereby not every book is stocked in a typical store. The online bookstores offer up some real duds that would never earn shelf space. For esoteric/specialized books, I order online, but for things of more general interest, I'm content to select from among the Barnes & Noble open stock or to browse a large used bookstore's oddities, although I feel too hampered by the limited selection of smaller stores.

> 9

>2 lilithcat: Do you find that you can make serendipitous book discoveries on LT?

I've made maybe one or two. A far cry from the hundreds of books in my library that I have stumbled across in physical bookstores.

I make beaded and wire jewelry. I can't tell you how many books I pick up, flip through and put back on the shelf because it is full of simple, over used projects or patterns. The cover said it was full of great ideas but, it isn't.
If I had to rely on a cover, not able to skim through the pages, I would have shelves of unused books. I might buy certain books on-line. My craft/hobby/cookbooks/ never. Every book says how wonderful the ideas/projects there are. For someone past the beginner stage, a good bead book is hard to find.

The saddest part of the demise of any media store , whether its books , music or movies , is that it will be one less place for facetoface social interaction . I'm sure we've all met friends or lovers at some type of media store and can't imagine having met them anywhere else .

If there were no physical bookstores, where could a guy go to try to pick up smart chicks?

>14 lkernagh: Ikernagh

There are other places that sell books (mostly second-hand) here and there are plenty of other bookshops in nearby towns. The prices our local independent bookseller charges are pretty much par for the course in this country. The store I'm talking about has another outlet in Sydney where the prices are the same.

Edited to add that I agree it will be sad to lose the social interaction of the bricks and mortar stores.

What I would like is a physical bookstore that sold ebooks. I love the brousing the aisles, I like the restricted choice, I hate trying to buy stuff online, but I prefer reading ebooks.

SO ideally the bookshop would have 1 physical copy of the books they choose to sell, and I'd plug my ereader in and buy an ecopy - they'd never be out of stock, and I wouldn't have to cope with annoying online retailers, passwords, login details, DRM, geographical restrictions, poor bandwith, archaic and useless searches, irritiating graphics, banner ads, et al that make online life at the moment such a pain.

I'll be sad if BnM stores do fade, especially the quirky little independants, but I seldom spend money in them, so I won't be surprised.

>25 reading_fox: I would like is a physical bookstore that sold ebooks.

Thinking in a 2025 way, what I would like to see is that buying a book would be like buying a packadge-- with the physical, audio, and e-version bundled together in some way. So that buying a physical book somehow gives you the "rights" to the e-version.

>26 southernbooklady:
That's easy - by then they'll be printing the e-book as a quantum microdot on the back cover of the paperback. All you need is to swipe your 4-D CueTiger over it a few hundred times until you've found the wretched thing...

I don't think I really care greatly whether bookshops of the "carpets-and-coffee-corners" variety survive - the experience of shopping in such a place, where everything is so obviously designed to separate you from your money as efficiently as possible and get you to buy the books everyone else is buying, is only marginally better than shopping online.

What is sadder is that specialist and secondhand bookshops are also disappearing into the internet. We need the chaos and serendipity of places like the photo lilithcat posted, and we need the occasional experience of chatting with a knowledgeable bookseller (although you can get that from internet-only booksellers too, if you meet them at a bookfair). I've found a lot of interesting books through places like LibraryThing, but there are always a few books that come into your life only because they were sitting on a shelf next to where the book you were looking for should have been. It would be sad to lose those. Of course, I have found a few interesting books by chance when searching for something else on ABEBooks, so serendipity will never die altogether...

I haven't purchased a book in a bookstore for myself for at least a couple of years. I have gone to bookstores in order to get last minute gifts for others. Usually, though, I could have simply paid for expedited shipping online instead and done just as well. This is true even though the town I live in is good sized and has a relatively large amount of book stores.

Actually, I find brick and mortar stores much more difficult to browse than sites like Amazon. Amazon tends to give me more structured browsing with many more items in a small field of interest, which is usually what I'm looking for. I tend to be disappointed when I pick a book off the shelf at random and brick and mortar store browsing isn't much more effective than random selection. Of course, I'm almost never buying books with significant numbers of illustrations or pictures. That is much easier to do in a physical location.

The real problem for me with the demise of the physical bookstore is the quick demise of public libraries that is likely to follow.

It has been a year since I've ordered a book online and I am a much happier book buyer for it, and I think I'm buying better books for it (I don't necessarily mean lit fic, I mean better books in all the genres I tend to read). I do make some serendipitous book finds on LT and realistically get most of my book recommendations from book bloggers and Twitter, but half of the people I'm getting recommendations from on Twitter are indie booksellers themselves, and they might not have the time or resources (ARCs) if they weren't reading for their bookselling. Sure, book bloggers get a lot of review copies as well, but it often seems to be a different set of books than indie booksellers receive.

Plus, regardless of the good finds I make online, I can't browse Amazon or LT the way I would like. Part of what I like about physical bookstores, particularly good indies, is that they are curated collections. My favorite store is very small, but everything there is very carefully chosen and vetted (or requested enough that it would be stupid of them not to keep it on hand, like the Stieg Larsson books). I would feel reasonably comfortable buying any book in the store and knowing that it is a good book. NOT so on Amazon, and not so on LT - although I trust the user data on LT more than that on Amazon to help me make decisions.

>29 DevourerOfBooks: Interesting point about the curated collections. I'm personally happy to discard from consideration books with low LT ratings, so I think that achieves a similar result.

If new book retailers were to disappear, I wouldn't be too upset. If second hand places and charity shops were no longer around I think I'd be quite upset. They're where I make my serendipitious book discoveries.

I would be quite upset if B&M stores went away; it makes me happy just to be surrounded by books. I can easily while away hours of time just browsing, whether I buy something or not. A bookstore is my default choice for occupying time after leaving somewhere at a time when it's too early for me to arrive at the place I'm due next.

Without reading the entire thread (yes, I'm lazy tonight), YES it definitely matters. Sure you can order books online, from more and more places within the last years, but there is nothing about the internet that can replace the physical reality of a bookstore.

I prefer used bookstores, the musty smell of old books that have been hanging out on the shelf forever. A particular bookstore I frequent is this little hole-in-the-wall type of place, very homey and run by a local family, and the way the shelves are set up the place is almost like a maze. Sifting through the maze, each aisle is like your own little place, I can sit there flipping through books for a good 20 minutes without seeing another person.

And that's what I love about bookstores. Clicking through webpages does not feel the same at all. I love going through the shelves, pulling out any book that looks interesting, flipping through the pages, smelling that old-book smell, feeling the book in my hands... It's the biggest reason I'll never get an e-reader. I can't even imagine what my life would be like without those constant trips to the bookstore.

>29 DevourerOfBooks:,30
That is a very good point: a specialist bookseller keeps in touch with what publishers are bringing out and what customers are looking for in that particular field of interest, and can keep a very well-targeted range in stock. My local railway bookshop often has very interesting books on the shelves that are difficult to find on the big internet booksellers and don't even register as a blip on LibraryThing, for instance.

We're losing a large (semi-)independent bookstore here in Nashville, Tenn. soon. Meditations on this by Adam Ross :
http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/at-stake-in-davis-kidds-closing-is-much-...

I agree with thorold point in 27 above with respect to specialist and secondhand stores.

As to b&m new bookstores, I like having them around, especially when I need/want a book immediately. I probably buy half my new books online and half in b&m stores.

But most of my secondhand and specialist books come from discoveries made during browsing. The loss of those stores would certainly matter to me.

Let us learn from the lessons of the past. When modern movable-type printing was invented, it began the reading and learning revolution which continues to this day. By making books more affordable and accessible, a new age of reading has begun. People will be reading more than ever, especially when they are waiting for something to commence or finish, or in transit. Unfortunately, we may end up like the situation in Britain where printed paperback books are sold for the same price as hardback books. Or perhaps e-readers will end up replacing largely paperback books. Hardback books will still be available but the price will probably increase due to decreased volume of sales.
Bookstores will probably decline in number and distribution the same as movie theaters did when television appeared, but these bookstores will have transferred their sales to on-line outlets. Public libraries will still need printed books and will probably replace the missing bookstores as places where one can browse amongst printed books, which can then be acquired electronically or by ordering them from on-line retailers.
The habits of a new generation (Generation 'E') which habituate them to the convenience of e-readers, and who will probably be noticeably adverse to carrying printed books, will also contribute to the decline, but not the disappearance, of printed matter. E-books are simply a new avenue of distribution which will increase the amount of time spent reading, as accessibility of both electronic and printed works reduces the spread of print bookstores.
What also will probably happen will be that books will no longer be such as to allow 'bookstores', as such, to stand alone, but rather be a section of other retail outlets as is now so common.

Lilithcat said it:

I need serendipity and spontaneity in my life.

I love walking, especially in the cities, and a necessary part of the urban landscape are places to ogle and/or enter. Being a book fiend, my favourite such places are bookstores. I can't imagine a city without bookstores and bookstore windows, any more than I could imagine a city without sidewalks and a healthy street life, before experiencing North America.

TineOliver and Thrin have already mentioned the price of books here in Australia, but I don't think it's the fault of the bookstores. The way things are at the moment I have the choice between buying a paperback at a local indie or having the hardcover shipped in from overseas for less. If the book I want is not in stock at my local bookstore, ordering online will usually result in me getting it not only cheaper but faster to boot.

If a book has a publisher in Australia then the bookstores have to buy it from them - they can't import a copy. Any attempt to get around this results in publishers and wholesalers refusing to supply them. Naturally, with a comfortable and legislatively protected monopoly in hand the Australian publishers don't feel at all compelled to offer competitive pricing. The increased prices are used to subsidise the production of Australian content, we are told - and without such subsidies Australian publishers would cease to exist.

As far as I'm concerned (and I'm certain I'm going to cop some flack for taking this position) the Australian publishing industry is going to kill independent bookstores (who can't compete with online prices, or the buying power of chains/department stores) - shortly before they kill themselves.

Does it matter if bookstores disappear? Yes, but I care much more about the people than the store. I care about having somewhere to go where they know me by name, know my tastes, can recommend books they know I'll like, and even nudge me towards books I mightn't have thought to consider otherwise. I care about being able to buy books from a store where the staff are all well read, with knowledge that is not only broad but deep on their topics of interest.

The death of the bookstore is all but inevitable - what I want to know is where I'll go to find those wonderful people once they're no longer behind the counter.

what I want to know is where I'll go to find those wonderful people once they're no longer behind the counter.

How about on LibraryThing?

>39 felius:,40
Anywhere where there's a one-bar electric fire, a battery-powered transistor radio playing Radio 3 very quietly, a Daily Telegraph and a strong smell of wet dog...

I agree wholeheartedly with what lilithcat said in #2. Not only do I love browsing and find many fascinating books that way that I would otherwise never know about, but I also value the knowledge of booksellers in small independent stores about their books and about their customers' tastes. I am fortunate to live in NYC, where we still have independent bookstores, although, sadly, far fewer than before, so that now I mostly have to make trips to them instead of just walking by and dropping in.

Although I do buy a lot from Amazon and Book Depository, that is when I know the particular book I want. LT conversations help me identify other books that might interest me. But browsing allows me to find the books I don't know I want. I would sorely miss that.

I love bookstores and continue to frequent them. Since starting to read fiction on my kindle, I'm not buying as many books at the stores as I used to, but I'm still more likely to go look at a book - feel the heft, check out the bibliography and print size, check the binding - than buy it blind online.

I got an ereader and an email newsletter from my favorite specialty bookstore the same day, which started me thinking about what i really want -- i don't really miss the physical shopping experience much, but i do value the recommendations from the shop owners. I read a LOT of mystery books, and don't need to have them taking up space in my library, so my preference would be to buy ebooks through a system that sent a finders fee to the author of the specialty newsletter. I know that LT provides some of that, and I've found some good things that way, but the bookstore newsletter clues me in to the good stuff right when it's coming out.

Putting aside all the warm fuzzy feelings I get when browsing bookstores, you never quite know what you'll get when you order online. I recieved a product from amazon today (not a book) that had no instructions and I had NO IDEA how to assemble. Had I bought it from an actual store, I would have a real-live-human to ask questions.

The same can be applied to books. I don't want to buy a book for my (future) children online and find some questionable material in it during bedtime. People need to be able to preview items. Flip through them. Make sure they are getting their money's worth.

Personally, I only purchase books online that I am 100% sure I want/need (think: textbooks, the next book in a series, etc).

I would say no, but on reflection I think my reading would lose a lot of its spontaneity without my local Half Price Books' clearance rack and the unusual things I end up bringing home from there all the time.

I'm not sure I'd be able to indulge my proclivity towards books with inside-cover inscriptions to people I don't know without physical bookstores, either.

Yes, I think that a world without book stores would be a great loss for several reasons.

#1 - Face to face social interaction with others who also love books. The internet isn't going to be able to replace it.
#2 - Jobs! The amount of people who work at book stores is amazing. The people you can see on the floor and the people in the back that you can't see would like to have a job. I don't think that Amazon or any other big online is going to be hiring.
#3 - Talking to people about recommendations or just discussing a really good facilitybook... priceless!
#4 - The ability to look through the entire book and see if it suits your needs. When I see 10 books all talking about how to learn to use Office 2010, how do you pick which one to buy? You flip through and see if you like the layout, how they wrote the content, and if they address the confusion you have about the product.
#5 - Even yesterday, I went to a local book store to pick up a specific title: Getting Things Done by David Allen. In the same section of business, I caught a glimpse of a title that intrigued me. The catch about this other book (about working in a retail store) was not really related to my first book and I don't think it would have come up in a recommendation.

Conveniently, I don't have an issue with driving several miles before finding a book store. If I did, I might have a different perspective on the importance of book stores; however, I live in Seattle and book stores and just as easy to find as a coffee shop.

It probably wouldn't make much difference to my book buying but it would make a hell of a difference to my life. Through 15 years of disability, I found myself less and less able to get into shops and ended up buying most of my books online but , even if I can't get there 2 or 3 times a week, as long as I have the use of any of my senses I will never lose the bliss of browsing and I'll be there any time I can possibly make it.

Book shops (in this country at least - can't speak for US) have an atmosphere that you don't find in any other shop. Aside from the couple of weeks before Xmas when the people who haven't picked up a book from the start of last year swarm in (more about them in a minute), these shops provide a little haven from the rest of the town and its bustle. In general they are quieter than other shops, full of people who will happily chat with strangers about their intended purchases. They (the shops, not the people) have their own smell, little places where a shopper can sit down and read for a while (often with a coffee), expert staff who can almost always remember the name of that book with the blue cover you saw by the Polish guy and which had a very funny passage about llamas. Nobody pushes or shoves you to get at the shelves. In my local bookshop I also have more chance of bumping into a friend that almost anywhere else in the whole city. They also remind the rest of the world that we readers exist and may even draw in (just occasionally) a non-reader who comes in out of the rain and leaves with a book - one that just might be the first book they've ever really enjoyed and which starts them off on a life of happy reading - you wouldn't get that with a website.

Incidentally (and a little off topic now) you'd think someone like me would hate the pre-Christmas crowds spoiling the peace and quiet of my local book shop but I love this time of year and some of the comments I've heard have been priceless. For example:

"Haven't they got a lot of books here!"

"Who reads all these?"

"My sister likes books. I thought they'd have one here."

"Why do they have baskets? Who needs a basket for a book?"

"I don't know, they all look the same to me."

and (genuinely) - "Is this where you buy books?"

Believe me, the world would be a very much sadder place without them.

49: "that book with the blue cover you saw by the Polish guy and which had a very funny passage about llamas."

Please tell me you are talking about a real book. I must know what it is! hehe

Yes, the bookstores in the US (or, at least the ones I've been to) definitely have that particular uniqueness that other types of stores don't have. The smell, the calmness, the more relaxed atmosphere...

When I was growing up in San Diego there was a specific bookstore, the building used to be a big theater, and it FELT like it. It felt so.... creative. The layout of the building, the decorations on the wall, the way the shelves were aligned... It was impossible to step into that bookstore and not feel like you've stepped back 20-30 years. Most of my childhood bookstore memories are of that place, and I can't even imagine a world without places like that.

#50 I'm having a sex change, changing my nationality and writing it now I know I've got one reader in the bag.

I would definitely say it would matter if physical bookstores disappeared. I do fear for my children (my 3 year old absolutely LOVES books) what books and literature will be like for them as they reach my age.

>>51 Booksloth: Booksloth- "I'm having a sex change..." Are you really thinking about it? Before you make a rash decision, I urge you to really consider the matter and choose something interesting.

It does matter if physical books stores vanish. I loved them, used and new alike, and always find something to buy in addition to what I went in for. Before my home library became more than I could read in a lifetime, I'd spend hours pouring over sections of books. I found Edmund Crispin, Geothe, the da Vinci notebooks, as well as scores of titles and authors I wouldn't have know of or taken an interest in if I hadn't spent so long running the stacks.

Now that I have a library that pleases me, I've developed a shorthand for scanning stacks. For example, almost all mysteries with white spines can be skipped (unless it's and IPL edition and then it's a sure buy), all HarperTorch Books are a buy, lots of stuff.

The only thing is this experience can be recreated virtually for me, and if it were I'd use it. New or used. The seller could show spines that I could scroll through, click on a book and its front and back cover showed, I'd be able to read the first few paragraphs and look at a page about 70 in to see if it's something I'd like. Yeah, I would go with that. But 15 years ago when I started buying a lot of books, being in the shop and able to ask questions was more helpful. Besides, I just like book stores.

Edited in what is probably a futile attempt to correct grammar and spelling, and improve comprehension. And as for a psychical book store, if it does vanish you're still going to have to pay some old hippie $15 for her to tell you where it is.

It does matter if psychical books stores vanish.

I wouldn't worry about it. If a psychic books store vanishes it'll probably pop up somewhere else.

Oh, you meant physical book store. Never mind (with Emily Latella voice).

I do enjoy going to a B&M bookstore however for me the nearest one is 120 miles away so I do 99% of my book buying online. I would be sad when I did go to one of the bigger towns in my area and couldn't spend a few hours roaming the store. but I do forsee it coming to that someday.

#53 And there was I thinking those choices were pretty limited. If you have any new and original ideas I'd love to hear them before I take that irrevocable step;-)

The ease of use of the online bookstore is actually seducing us. We like surfing around to find our books. We like reading what others think about the book. We like reviewing books for others. We like the "personalised" suggestions. Its a very satisfactory experience.
The online bookstore is priming us for the ebook experience. The convenience of the online bookstore is then matched by the convenience of the ebook - fast delivery, to my hand, now.
Would it matter if the physical bookstore disappears? It limits the way we interact with books, but I think I while away as much time in the online bookstore as in the physical one, so I think not.
Would it matter if the physical library disappears?

We like surfing around to find our books. We like reading what others think about the book. We like reviewing books for others. We like the "personalised" suggestions.

No, we don't!

I tend to treat online booksellers a bit like supermarkets - places where you want to spend as little time as possible. Type in a search string on the home page, select the item you want from the half dozen or so hits, pay for it, and log out again. The simpler and quicker the process is, the more likely I am to use the site again.

In a real bookshop I'm quite capable of losing track of time, even if I've just popped in to collect something I ordered.

#57, 58 I don't surf online for book ideas either. I go to buy something I already know I want. I'm not interested in "personalized" suggestions or in what people I don't know think about about a book. I am interested in what people whose opinions I've come to respect here on LT say about a book, and that will lead me to look for a book in a bookstore or, failing that, online. But, as I said above, browsing in bookstores lets me find books I didn't know I wanted.

> 57

You mean "I", not "we". Speak for yourself.

> 59

Exactly. I go to online bookstores if I know exactly what I want and it's not available from my local independent bookstore. That usually means it's out-of-print.

There are some boutique publishers that print small runs of books and don't use distribution channels or ship to bookstores. Their books do not show up in bookstores. I can see not using online sources for mainstream books. There are true gems to be had though by developing some online 'looking for books' habits. I like and use bookstores and I like and use the net for books. Serendipity plays a role in both spheres, I've found.

# 58-60, Snap, as I said in #25 "I hate trying to buy stuff online ... with annoying online retailers, passwords, login details, DRM, geographical restrictions, poor bandwith, archaic and useless searches, irritiating graphics, banner ads, et al that make online life at the moment such a pain.
"

When it works, it can be great, but its never as pleasurable as losing hours brousing a real shop.

#82 irritiating graphics, banner ads, et al that make online life at the moment such a pain.

For these, at least for Firefox users, there is a solution: AdBlock Plus. This automatically blocks ads and you can add sites to its list of things to block by right clicking on them. Now, when I use a computer that doesn't have it, I'm shocked by all the ads.
"

I don't think book stores will disappear, I think they will evolve.

The problem with current book stores is that ... they sell books.

Bare with me.

I don't need a book store to buy books, book stores need to sell an experience, they need to have someone who knows about books work there, host book clubs, have events and many other experiences which my uncreative mind cannot come up with.

Basically, they need to stop "selling books" and change their business model to sell experiences.

>64 ZoharLaor: Errr... in the UK we call such book stores "libraries".

#64 Heaven preserve us please! My local Waterstones has recently 'evolved' from being a bookshop to being a bookshop plus coffee bar (to be honest, I didn't mind that bit) to now having about 1/4 of its space taken over with stationery covered with pussy cats holding hands (you know the kind of thing, I'm sure). We already have numerous shops selling this stuff - all that has really changed is that the shop is now unable to stock some of the lesser known titles it used to be so useful for. When I go to a book shop it's because I want as wide a selection as possible of books to browse and choose from, not an 'experience'.

>64 ZoharLaor: "to now having about 1/4 of its space taken over with stationery covered with pussy cats holding hands"

Bookstores call these things "gifts" to their customers' faces, and "sidelines" to their suppliers and "crap" amongst themselves. But they stock it because the mark up is so good-- whatever the price you see on all the little doodads at the counter, you can bet that the cost to the shop was at least half that, if not more.

Books, on the other hand, come pre-priced and at a limited wholesale discount so ironically, the more books they sell, the less money they make. The more kittens-holding-hands kitchen magnets they sell, the better off they are.

You know, as eReaders become more popular, there will be a glut in used books (actually, there's always a glut in used books, sellers can't move what they've got.) The problem is the reader base is shrinking so a lot of the salable books will wind up with the huge eRetailers in used books (anyone who's familiar with DC probably joins me in mourning the loss of the annual Good Will Used Book Sale, which moved online. Now there was a longish event name to conjure with.)

Because a lot of the clothes donated to Good Will make it to the desperately poor in Africa and other countries, I hope to see an improvement in the selection of their reading habits as well. Maybe the next time I see a news photo of villagers in Soweto or Kathmandu, the 'Eat Bertha's Mussels' t-shirt will be paired with a copy of Ulysses, rather than the dog-eared manual on malaria or water purification they've been stuck with for so long.

>65 TheoClarke: >66 Booksloth: >67 southernbooklady: you missed my point.

Some independent book stores (very few) are doing very well selling an experience.
One is Book Ends in Ridgewood NJ http://www.book-ends.com/ (granted it seems they have an "in" in the publishing world).

> 64

Bare with me.

No, thank you. We haven't even been introduced!

I don't need a book store to buy books, book stores need to sell an experience, they need to have someone who knows about books work there, host book clubs, have events and many other experiences which my uncreative mind cannot come up with.

I don't see how that is "evolving". Bookstores, at least the good ones, have always hired people who know about books, had author readings, hosted book clubs, etc., etc.

I admit that I do most of my book buying online these days too. I mostly go for comparatively obscure books, often out of print. So the chance of finding anything on Abebooks or Antiqbooks, or even eBay, is much better than potluck searching of bookstores.

But I would terribly, terribly miss browsing real bookshelves, the weekly open air book market in my home town, etc.

>69 ZoharLaor: Some independent book stores (very few) are doing very well selling an experience.

Back in the days when Gourmet Magazine used to still exist, they would do a call at the end of the year for readers to write in about their best restaurant visits of the year. It was always fascinating to read, because 90% of the letters didn't talk about the food, they talked about the experience. "So and so heard I was sick and had to cancel a reservation, and brought me some of their chicken soup!" The great weight of each account was about the human interactions, the unexpected pleasure of being treated like a real person by other real people. Of being made to feel...special, and part of something special.

Computers, by and large, are terrible at treating people like they are special.

>>72 southernbooklady: sbl- Excellent point.

I lived in a part of the world where the nearest bookstore was 100 miles away. (So was the nearest McDonald's). My source was the local library which was 20 miles away, or the school library, which I soon outgrew. Later I found a bookstore in that town 100 miles away that would mail books I purchased. I had to send them a check first and then they would send the book, but I purchased many a book I heard about on the Phil Donahue show that way. In the 1990's I moved to a town that had a population of 100,000 and NO bookstores. Four years ago we got a Barnes & Noble in town and I love it.

That being said, I have spent a great deal of my life studying reading habits. There is no doubt in my mind that bookstores have to have a coffee shop. My question about my local Barnes & Noble is how long can the square footage of the coffee shop support the square footage of the huge book warehouse?

The bottom line is that there are fewer and fewer readers who buy fewer and fewer books. Most of the people in Barnes & Noble are there to drink coffee, talk, and sit quietly at tables where they study, but don't necessarily read or purchase books or magazines. And where did the newspapers go? Bookstores and libraries are morphing into a safe zone where people can go to see and be seen. Perhaps they should start charging admission because there is expense in a bookstore or library. Somehow the electric bill has to be paid. For that reason I don't buy as many books on-line as I could because there is expense with that. It isn't free. Somebody has to buy the hardware and provide the wireless access.

I think that bookstores and libraries need to do more with book discussion groups and decor. Most bookstores are boring looking. They need to become more like high class coffee shops or restaurants. Including my industrial looking Barnes & Noble. They need to make the reading experience more of a destination experience to fill that need to see and be seen. And charge admission.

#74 I lived in a part of the world where the nearest bookstore was 100 miles away. (So was the nearest McDonald's).

Every cloud, eh?

Ugh. I hate what our local Barnes & Noble has turned into. When I first moved here in 2002, there were maybe three or four easy-chairs in a small section of the store, and the rest of the store was *books*. Just like it should be. Shelves and shelves of books, all different genres, all different publication years.

Now, they have roughly 1/3 of the store turned into a Starbucks, and another 1/3 of the store filled with easy chairs in this big open space which *used* to have shelves of books. That leaves roughly 1/3rd of the *bookstore* for books. The selection is horrible, hardly anything that hasn't been on a bestseller list in the past two years.

I go to bookstores for *books*, thank you very much, not for coffee and easy chairs. If I want an "experience" they have book clubs, readings, and book-related contests at the library every day of the week. I am one of those strange people who thinks a bookstore should be primarily about books. What a thought, huh?

I am not sure I like the idea of bookstores as coffee shops, but I can't deny what I see. I work in a library and our user door counts have fallen steadily in the last ten years. In our case the rich people don't use the library as they can use Barnes & Noble or Starbucks for a place to flash their fancy electronic hardware, and they don't care about supporting those who don't have as much electronic access. In order to survive our library is going to have to do something drastic. The taxpayer money just isn't covering expenses, especially the electronic monster.

About ten years ago at a library conference a publisher and bookseller research project showed that 12% of the population purchases about 80% of the books sold. Since then the number of books sold has also dropped steadily. Profits have remained level due to increasing the price of the product but price increases will hit a ceiling eventually.

I think the question for bookstores is do they play to the audience they have or try to get new customers?

12% of the population purchases about 80% of the books sold

Sigh, big sigh... But you can't even blame them then. Maybe "us readers" are a dying race...

I just thought of something. Despite the well-publicized decline in readers in general and physical-book readers specifically, it was not all that long ago that my town built a brand new library. HUGE, roughly three times the size of the old one. It opened just a year and a half ago. And this library is *book*-dedicated. There is a computer center and a few "meeting" rooms, but it is overwhelmingly books. Not even magazines or whatever, but books.

It makes me wonder, now. It wasn't that long ago. I remember all the fuss about the new library opening, how many people went to the opening ceremony, how many articles in the newspaper about how busy it was. I go there at least twice a month and it's always fairly busy.

Maybe "readers" aren't dying out, just book *buyers*?

Bravo, Heather's town!

#75 Most bookstores are boring looking.

Sigh. Not to me, but maybe to those we should all hope would be lured into bookstores if they are to stay in existence.

My B&N, by the way, where I rarely buy books even though it is an excellent store and only a few blocks from me (because I prefer to buy at independent stores) recently took the area that had been devoted to new and popular older books (on tables) and dedicated it to a Nook (their e-reader) center. Another sigh.

By the way, when this B&N opened up, they had LOTS of easy chairs and reading spots throughout the store. As soon as the three neighborhood bookstores in the area had gone out of business, they took out 95% of the reading spots (aside from in the money-making cafe). At least they devoted the space to books.

>79 Heather19:-Heather we just opened a new bigger library in our town (its been 2 years now) too and my readership has gone up and up I have people who have lived in town for years and never had a library card because they always bought books, they tell me books have gotten too expensive and since I have all the new releases they'll just come here.

#76 You echo my thoughts completely (although, being slightly disabled, I do find it quite handy to be able to sit and have a coffee to recuperate in the middle of a long book-browse) but yes, yes YES, bookshops should be for books.

I don't have any statistics on the subject but my own observation tells me that the majority of people who buy books are adults - especially from around 30 upwards - and yet it seems that the shops are desparate to attract more youngsters. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but I don't see why it has to always be done at the expense of the core group of buyers.

Seating areas and coffee shops are at least places that encourage the buyer to stay in the shop and continue browsing while the vast areas given over to 'gifts' and 'sidelines' (thank you, southernbooklady, for giving me the correct terms, though I think my chosen one would be 'crap') appear to be aimed, as always, at the lowest common denominator and those with the attention span of a goldfish. No requirement any more to browse quietly for hours, now you can look at a couple of best-selling celebrity biogs and run squealing with joy to the fluffy pencil cases.

I do also buy a lot of books online and, as someone else has already pointed out, that tends to happen more with the more obscure kind of book and of course that will be increasingly the case if bookshps insist on selling only the top fifty to make way for their 'extras'. I guess I'm trying to hold back the tide and it's pointless to complain. At least I can hope that there will soon be a gap in the market for the occasional little independent seller who is happy with making a living (as opposed to making a fortune) to open the traditional type of shop once the big chains have done with them. The pendulum just might swing back one day . . . maybe.

I love libraries more than bookstores, and I love used bookstores more than new bookstores, because the first two are the only places I can meet my out-of-print needs. (I do not shop on the Internet.)

A room, a house, a building, a store with lots of good old books is where I want to spend almost all my time. I can't stand the fact that most of the people in the library are just there for the free computers and printers. I want the kinship of readers, real readers, bibliophiles/biblioholics like myself.
Alas, alack, I was born too late.

#84 I'll admit it's an age thing here too. I still hanker after the days when silence was expected in libraries. I have a theory that one day there will be such a need for quiet places that someone will have to invent a building where people can go just to be silent. Who knows, after a few years they might even put some books there and call it a library.

Booksloth, I laugh at your jest, and I also so, so relate to the truth in your words.

I lived in DC for years. I was never more than a block away from one of those colonial or Greek revival libraries Rockefeller donated to the city, and I worked within a few blocks of Reiter's Scientific and a Borders.

I'll say this for shopping online- it never smells like urine.

Booksloth, come visit Yuma.

The new library actually has a "quiet room", with a big sign on the door stating the fact that it is meant to be completely quiet inside. I've used it for brainstorming story-ideas a few times.

#88 I don't need to visit - it sounds exactly like where I'll go when I die if I've been very, very good! (Second thoughts, maybe I should visit after all.)

12% of readers buy 80% of books:
Was it ever any more uniform than that? Growing up in an industrial town in the north of England, I don't think more than two or three of the families we knew had significant numbers of books. For most people it was enough to have an atlas, a Bible, an Alistair Maclean or Barbara Cartland from last summer, and a couple of football annuals or a Guinness Book of Records that someone had given them for Christmas. Many of those people were keen readers and used the library a lot, but it simply didn't occur to them to buy books for themselves. Even if they had wanted to buy books they wouldn't have had much opportunity: W.H. Smiths still had the provincial book trade sewn up, so unless you lived in a big city or a tourist/university town you had less choice than you now find within arm's length of the cash registers in the coffee and carpets bookshops.

>88 Heather19:,89
I think you need a little bit of uniform background noise to work comfortably - if it is too silent you start focussing on every tiny bit of sound. In the basement of the Radcliffe Science Library it used to be so quiet that you could hear a postgraduate snoring from five or six tables away. Enough to drive you crazy after a couple of hours. But that was in the days of pencil and paper - I expect it's all clattering laptop keyboards and Windows startup sounds now.

> 70

Bare with me.

No, thank you. We haven't even been introduced!

LOL, ooops

I, for one, have no regrets for the passing of the brick & mortar bookstore. I have some good memories of trawling through some in the past. But I’m content for these to remain memories – they don’t have to happen again to be valuable to me.

Virtual bookshopping is such a richer experience, however; with browsability playing no small part. For example, I can start with a reading list that I don’t have to copy down and put in my pocket. I can just pull up LT’s “The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today” (compiled by Martin Seymour-Smith) at http://www.librarything.com/bookaward/The+100+Most+Influential+Books+Ever+Writte... . From this, I can batten on I And Thou by Martin Buber and, within a matter of seconds, can be virtually searching the shelves of ABEBooks, Amazon, Alibris and a dozen other online brokers. I can “look inside” Amazon’s offering and decide I respond to the look & feel of this book as well as its content, without having to stand in the aisle of some bookstore, blocking traffic and incurring the suspicious glare of the owner: “This isn’t a library, buster; either buy or move on!”

But Amazon’s gonna charge me $30.76 for their copy. I don’t have that much in my jeans. Now, on the other hand, BooksSquared in Dallas has got a copy for one buck. However, I notice that this copy has “small creases and minimal underlining.” Back onto the shelf; I like to do my own creasing and underlining.

Now here’s a copy rated “near fine” at the 5-star rated The Book Faire in Placentia, CA (what a name! How would you like to have to tell people you live in Placentia?) for $4.95, including shipping! That, I can handle.

And while I’m at it, I notice that right next to I and Thou on the virtual shelf is Thou Shalt Not Dump the Skater Dude and Other Commandments I Have Broken by Rosemary Graham. Sounds interesting – and it’s only $1.98. What can I lose? It might offer an interesting take on “the close association of the relation to God with the relation to one's fellow-men” that seems to be so important to Buber.

All in all, a good trip to the bookstore. I did I mention that I was simultaneously able to watch Alabama thump Auburn while also watering my front lawn?

I did I mention that I was simultaneously able to...

And that's something I don't envy you one bit. To each their own simultaneous entertainment.

One can browse, sort of, online, but in no way is it "richer", IMO, than browsing in actual bookstores. You are always limited by your own horizons. There are topics and writers I'll NEVER seek out or even accidentally fall upon (I'm too precise and informed for that) online--but it just may happen that they'll attract my attention in a bookstore. For example, on the remainder tables, to which I give a scrupulous once-over.

And there's no comparison in quality control online and in bookstores. You simply can't ever trust that the description of the book will agree with yours, or even that you'll get it at all. (Says she bitterly, waiting for two online orders for more than a month...)

I just got back from having my car worked on and started talking with the garage owner about eReaders. Interesting bit before we got distracted: He is a binge reader and his wife more constant. Having an eReader (Kindle and iPad) has increased the number of books that together they have bought; he has made some impulse purchases when the price was a dollar or two; and while he does use the 'download free chapter' feature, what he's read has never pushed him on to buy the book; he only uses the library to take his kids to get books.

ETA He also said that he still has the paper delivered, even though it's available online. He said that he 'is a paper reader, and there's something about that 'plonk' of the paper hitting the stoop on Sunday morning.

Some data has to have been collected on this; anyone know? Also, has anyone thought about creating a survey? We could offer it to library patrons, etc.

> 93. on the remainder tables, to which I give a scrupulous once-over.

What about BookCloseOuts.com ? Or the almost Borges-esque (Borgesian?) remainder table of googling "clearance" and "books"?

You've got a point about the time frame. But all that will be cleared up when the eBook comes fully into its own. You get your copy in a nanosecond; with nary a highlight or a dog-ear or a marginal note.

The problem with "browsing" online, aside from not having those serendipitous moments that come in bookstores (at least for me), is that a lot of times I need to turn the pages of a book to see if it interests me, read a little bit here and there, etc. I know Amazon tries to do this with its "look inside" feature, but then you see the parts they (or the publisher) have chosen for you to look at, not the ones you might just discover on our own. But I conclude that this is a matter of temperament, like so much iife.

Duck! Llama llama duck! Llama!

Ideally all of us will be always able to shop in the ways we prefer...

There's always Buenos Aires. Bad postal service, no internet shopping to speak of, and real bookstores on every corner!

> 96 -- you see the parts they (or the publisher) have chosen for you to look at...

But in the B&M bookstore you see only the books that they have chosen for you to look at. If it's not on the physical shelf, it might as well not exist. In the cyber store you can see all the books that are for sale anywhere in the world.

Now that's browsability!

>99 jburlinson: If it's not on the physical shelf, it might as well not exist. In the cyber store you can see all the books that are for sale anywhere in the world.

You can, but you won't--unless you know to go looking.

This is, I think, the fundamental difference that people are talking about when they speak of "curated" and "uncurated" inventory. Amazon and the Internet in general is uncurated. Anything can be bought online and your only real concern is that the description you read on the website might not meet your actual expectations when the book arrives in the post. When the world switches to e-books, this will matter not at all.

On the other hand, people--even people who work in corporate chain bookstores--are constantly drawing unexpected and unpredictable connections and associations between books that computers and databases (even LT) can't hope to anticipate. This comes out in a myriad of ways from what's faced out to what's marked "staff picks."

And these lead us to books we didn't even know we might be interested in. One of my favorite things to do around Halloween, for example, is to check out my local bookstore's "Dead but still publishing" display of new books that were released after the author had died.

I visit the display because I find the concept amusing and because the booksellers don't put just anything on it, just the books they think are worth reading.

But the truth is, without it, I might not have been looking for Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet because Judt hasn't been on my radar at all. Well, he is now.

That kind of serendipity requires actual people, not databases and search algorithms, to achieve. But as a book buyer you have to be open to a state of existence of not knowing what you want. And strangely enough, the more of a bibliophile you become, the harder it is to achieve that state of mind.

I've already said (ad nauseaum) why it would matter to me is bookshops disappeared but I've also been pondering upon whether it would matter to the world in general. As many others have already pointed out, those of us who want books will go and look for them and heaven knows, we'll find them somehow. We may even develop strategies for making better choices from books we haven't actually 'met' (taking recommendations from our LT friends, for example)

But the trouble with internet shopping is that it makes it so much easier to avoid anything you didn't initially set out to look for and this is where I feel the world will suffer if physical bookshops vanish. How many people, I wonder, picked up the first book of a long reading habit while sheltering from the rain or accompanying a friend into the shop or seeing something that looked interesting in the shop window? - all things that would never have happened if all bookshops were online. I can't help wondering if online-only sales would lead to much more of a division between readers and non-readers and that surely can't be a good thing.

And here's another selfish reason why I don't want to lose them. I hate shopping - absolutely hate it! The only shops I can spend hours in are either bookshops or art supply shops. If I have to go clothes shopping I need a reward at the end of it all. Going to the shops without the possibility of getting sidetracked into the bookshop at the end of the day would be so unbearable I don't think I'd ever tackle it. I'd just sit in my bedroom in the old jammies I'd been wearing for years, sobbing over my old books. A town without a bookshop is a truly horrible thing (Newquay (UK) please take note)! When any type of shop disappears there is always a knock-on effect on the surrounding businesses and any kind of specialist shop disappearing from the highstreet is another step on the way to the death of other businesses in the same area. Even leaving aside the question of these shops selling my favourite commodity, diversity is what keeps our shopping centres alive and long may that continue.

Yeah, there's nothing grimmer than a street of shops of which NONE is a bookstore. Gap after Club Monaco after Macdonalds after Banana republic after Starbucks after Zara and so on for blocks. Disgusting disheartening and dismal.

Another thing to consider about eBooks is that retailers may move to electronic forms of books and start dropping hard copy titles. Readers may not have a choice in the matter. Publishers will comply to maintain sales, or even increase sales. Netflix has a goal to move all or most of it's content on-line; already some movies I want to watch are only available streaming, where the reverse was true a few years ago.

#103 Okay, now you've just scared the hell out of me. I suppose I have enough books here to keep me in rereads for the rest of my life if that happens (very nearly enough in TBR, in fact!) but it's a post-apocalyptic style future I want no part of.

Ed to figure out whether it should be post apocalyptal or post apocalyptic. As you can see, I went for 'yptic' in the end.

Aaaaand there goes my goal of someday joining Netflix. I can't watch movies on my computer, it's too dang slow. Also, it gives me headaches.

Which is another reason I don't understand the fascination with e-readers. Are they somehow different then a computer screen, that you *don't* get headaches when staring at it for hours on end? Maybe I missed that when reading about them.

#105 Quite a few people have told me that is the case. I've never tried one myself for more than a couple of minutes so can't really comment.

>105 Heather19:
That is supposed to be the case because most of them (Nook Color and iPad being the exceptions I know about) are not backlit. E-ink is supposed to be much closer to reading a piece of paper than reading on your computer.

I dislike shopping as well. But I can spend hours in a bookstore - as long as I have a cup of coffee.

I think that the crux of the matter is that readers are a dying breed. As the readers go, so goes the bookstores.

> 108. I think that the crux of the matter is that readers are a dying breed.

No way. We're just reading things other than books. For example, I just read your message and you're reading mine --with nary a book in sight. While I'm writing this message, I'm also watching a pool tournament on TV and reading all the signs on the walls and trying to read the little message on the winner's shirt, although she won't stand still long enough for me to make it out. OK, now I see it -- "predator."

I have always believed that there are hardly any "real" readers out there. What's a real reader, you ask? Someone to whom reading feels as essential as food, water and air. Please note I said FEELS -- of course you won't die if you don't read, as you would without food, water and air. Oprah Winfrey is quoted as saying her BODY doesn't feel right if she hasn't read in a couple of days. Me too.

I don't think I'm keen on feeling Oprah Winfrey's body, even if I haven't read in a few days. The punishment doesn't fit the crime!

109> I think in the context of this discussion we can safely assume that a reader is someone who reads novels, short stories and the like (whether in paper form or e-books) and not someone who only reads signs and internet forums.

As many others have already pointed out, those of us who want books will go and look for them and heaven knows, we'll find them somehow. We may even develop strategies for making better choices from books we haven't actually 'met' (taking recommendations from our LT friends, for example)

I think this is really a key point. Finding books in a brick-and-mortar store versus finding books online isn't about getting recommendations from real people versus getting recommendations from algorithms. There are real people online too, and I'd personally trust many of their opinions more than the opinions of the unknown bookstore employee who set up a given display table.

For me, if/when it happens, I'll mourn the loss of physical bookstores. While I'll use online stores to buy SPECIFIC books I definitely want, online "recommendations/others also bought" just don't cut it.

Like several others have said, I like to browse. I like to find books that catch my eye and interest. There's a number of books I've purchased because of that. (Most recently last week out of the bin of "Bargain" books at the store I work in.) I would have never known about those books otherwise, and I would have missed out on hours of enjoyable reading.

One thing I wonder about, especially with secondhand bookshops increasingly becoming online-only, is whether there will be a sort of "inverse long tail" effect? The conventional wisdom is that internet shopping makes it easier for obscure products to find customers, but in the long term, what happens to products of such low value that it isn't worth spending time keying them into an online catalogue or sending them by post? I suspect that there will be all sorts of popular writers of the past who will just drop off the radar if we don't have bargain boxes any more.

>113 _Zoe_: Finding books in a brick-and-mortar store versus finding books online isn't about getting recommendations from real people versus getting recommendations from algorithms. There are real people online too, and I'd personally trust many of their opinions more than the opinions of the unknown bookstore employee who set up a given display table

The key word in that statement is "unknown." The person I trust most in the world to recommend books to me is a guy I've only met once in person, but have a ten-year relationship with via email and online book discussion forums. The second person is my mom. The third, a man who happens to be the father of one of those bookstore employees who sets up displays.

Who do I not trust? Or not at least for a long, long time? Your average Amazon reviewer. The people who only exist as a username on some website. And 99.99% of database algorithms designed to answer the question "if you liked that, try this."

#115 thorold

Your observation about the value of the products being of such low value that it isn't worth spending time typing them into a catalog means that the future of on-line second hand stores is tied to the success or failure of the U. S. Postal system. Right now, if I understand it correctly, a used book can be sold for 1 cent because the charge for mailing is set at (rough guess here) $4.00. However, the real cost of mailing is less than the charged $4.00. The seller makes a profit on the fact that mailing rates are cheap. The rates for mailing are going to go up and that will cut into the profits from selling used books very cheaply. Of course the decline in the numbers of pieces of mail sent will make the price for mailing go up and a vicious upward spiral continues with the result that used books won't be worth offering for sale.

I like the physicality of places. I like changing places, moving from one to the second to the third collecting little incidents of diverse encounters--with views, sounds, smells, ideas, little whatnots of existing. I like seeing faces I never could imagine, and those who look, unaccountably, as if I had dreamed of them. I like seeing other people looking at books. I like seeing books in bookcases and stacks and on tables. I like the tables!

My apartment's great, I have spent whole days in it without going out, reading four and five books in a row, ordering more online, and dinner on the phone. But the wide world outside is even greater, and I like it even better, all its many dimensions.

The internet is just one corner, one situation, one venue, one possibility. It's great to have it, but it doesn't replace all the rest for me, not by far.

The chance that each of us will one day have an eReader is pretty good. What would you like to see in yours? What would you hate to see? I'd like to see a robust tagging app, so that I could trace 'probability' or 'zombie apocalypse' through everything I've read. I'd hate to see ads, probably hate tweets or IMs.

> 118. You paint a pretty picture of what is often called the real world. But a person doesn't have to go to a bookstore to seek out little whatnots. In fact, I typically find bookstores to be a little impoverished as whatnot-observing venues, compared with, say, dog shows, for example, or historical re-enactments of the battle of Vimy Ridge.

>118 LolaWalser:,120
For whatnots in the Victorian furniture sense, bookshops are not bad, although teashops and antique shops are probably better...

I would hate to see bookstores disappear....where would I spend my lunch hour??? Where will I randomly meet local authors, Where will be able to check out the people who read the same books as me?? At my lunch hour book store (Dymocks) they know me suggest books for me say hello in the street and i love being in the store. I like picking up a book because the cover catches my eye or that moment when you realise there is a new book out in a series and you need to buy it. Admittedly I buy a lot of books online now but I still prefer the bookstore, the smell, the lights, the people and the bookshelf envy.

Besides, you wouldn't see this guy at an online bookstore!

I was perfectly happy using the library 95% of the time and Amazon here and there until I moved to Portland, ME and discovered the joy of the local bookstore. In a way, they're taking on the duties of the library...they're providing awesome reader's advisory and collecting unique books that target specific audiences. For someone like me with a specific interest (history of pop music) this is a great thing. I have my favorite stores to look through for my subject and in my time spent browsing the other stores I've now got an idea where to look for other people.

>95 jburlinson:

You should never have directed me to BookCloseOuts. I think I've been browsing for 2 hours now, and I've already bought 12 new books for less than $20! What an awesome time-sink this is.

115 " I suspect that there will be all sorts of popular writers of the past who will just drop off the radar if we don't have bargain boxes any more.
"

This is always the case, has been and will be, it's not a bad thing. Of course some of those who drop out of sight, could have been epic geniuses whose written world could have enthralled the entire world, but for the want of decent marketing ... but its not that likely. Much more probable is that they are generic recyclers of badly written pulp, and as such deserve their fate.

37 "Unfortunately, we may end up like the situation in Britain where printed paperback books are sold for the same price as hardback books."

Where in Britain does this happen? What is this supposed to mean?
FYI here in Britain the Actual RRPs are usually
A/B format pb (Mass Market) £6.99 - £8.99
C Format (Trade pb) £9.99 - £12.99
Hardbacks £15.99 - £18.99

I like going to physical bookshops to see what and who is new on the shelf, but usually i note them on my phone for research on the internet. I think if Amazon could come up with a way of filtering and showing me new books (no reprints) released in the last X months that would do fine there but you just get everything thrown at you all at once so it is too many books.

The thing that bugs me the most on the internet is the inability to read the blurbs, I like the blurbs, if it's interesting i might just buy it. Usually on the net I end up wading through a few reviews just to find out what it is about, and publishers descriptions aren't usually any better because they are often full of superlatives from reviewers and no info.

#127 re #37 Ooh, missed that! Yup - not in the Britain I live in. Such a strange idea I can't help wondering where it came from.

#128 possibly for the "new bestsellers in hardback at Tesco at 40% off RRP" not being that different in price to a paperback of a non-bestseller at RRP

#129 still not sure why that is unfortunate - and it's no different from what you get in Walmart over in the US. Yeah I did get the new Pratchett for £9.59 (rrp £18.99) but in pb it'll be rrp £6.99 and they'll sell it for £3.75. Top sellers get discounted anywhere. It's not "the same price" which ever way you look at it.

Maybe he knows that hardbacks were ~£12.99 about 5 years ago but now she's getting pbs for the same price (It seems the new TP goes up £1 every year and i know this because I buy them every year)

Saturday, Dec. 4- is the first annual Take Your Child to a Bookstore day. So round up some chirruns and take them.

http://kids.baristanet.com/2010/12/take-your-child-to-a-bookstore-day/

Do you have to bring them back?

*giggle/snort*

First Diet Pepsi spew of the day

*high five for Booksloth*

Interesting article on this subject

End Of Days For Bookstores? Not If They Can Help It

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/14/132026420/end-of-days-for-bookstores-not-if-they-c...

If used bookstores disappeared it would be a devastating turn of events. It would be like living in a post-apocalyptic world without the nukes.
Minneapolis has lost two more independent used bookstores in the past couple of weeks.

Of course it matters if physical bookstores disappear.

The internet can't replicate those serendipitious, "wasn't really looking for it but now I've found it I want it" moments. It's fine if you're after a cheap best seller or something specific from the "long tail" which no bricks-and-mortar bookshop could practically be expected to keep in store.

Charity shops are also the best way I can think of to recycle books and provide a way for someone else to enjoy the book you've just finished.

Finally, I'd like to see the electronic pop-up book.

If physical bookstores disappear, what would I have done at a time like this, when I realize my grandparents are going to be with us for Christmas and I don't have anything for my Grandpa? I called my favorite indie and they put a copy of Unbroken on hold for me. Sure, a hardcover at an indie is sort of expensive, but to get the book in time for Christmas from Amazon I'd have had to pay for shipping anyway and, if I have to choose, I'd rather a local bookstore get that extra money than Amazon and UPS.