And even Powell's doesn't have everything (say Tyler Cowen's reading list). I know because I've asked at that little desk on the 1st floor that gives out slips, and they couldn't help me out.
(It’s great, regardless, having been there myself.)
The worst library is still better than the best corporate bookstore.
We are talking about book stores, meaning there is a desire to own the book being read. You don't get to own the books in a library. As someone who heavily annotates my books—except fiction—I will need to own a physical copy (or a digital edition). I haven't been to a book store in a while, but I recall the last two times being quite disappointing. Meanwhile, on Amazon, or other online providers, I can find what I need more often than not.
FYI, Home Depot will sell you a box truck for about $44k; which I think is a pretty good deal.
I've bought a lot of books from the thrift store that had library stamps in them.
Still, for availability, the real winner is the not-necessarily-legal archives where you can find, say, OOP foreign books that I'd have to cross an ocean to find in a library.
"They certainly have Asimov and European classics."
I live in a top 5 city in Poland. My local library *has only school readings and harlequins". Interlibrary loan or anything else? Nope, they don't offer that.
Some recommendations: Seattle has Ada technical books. Portland has Powells. Strand in NYC has some technical books. and in Boston MIT Press Bookshop is gold. There are others.
That can't be provided by every local book store.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM&pp=ygUWQmV6b3MgZWF...
When I bought my copy of Peter Karow's _Digital Typefaces_ the proprietor asked if I was in a hurry to receive it, and if not, if it would be okay if he reviewed it first to see if it was something he would want to purchase.
The trouble these days isn't finding paperback sci-fi in used bookstores, but finding used bookstores at all in the first place. They stills exist but not in the numbers they used to. If you just look up bookstores on Google maps, many of the results are coffee shops that have a single bookshelf just for the aesthetics of nominally being a bookstore. You know a real bookstore because the shelves are cheap and mismatched, with as many crammed into the space as they can manage. That's what happens if they're trying to make ends meet by buying and selling books, rather than printing money selling coffee and ambience to laptop workers.
I recently went to a relatively new Barnes & Noble in a growing flyover state city, and was very surprised at the way this location felt like Borders or B&N 20+ years ago.
No substantial sign of the bookstore -> big giftshop with books trend I felt like I'd seen everywhere over the last decade. Very substantial selection of books, pretty sure I saw an Asimov title and some Manning.
This was in an area with a lot of growth (and tech expansion specifically), but chances are slim you've even heard of the city unless you've lived in this state (one not even in the top half of populous states in the US).
It's especially interesting considering that B&N owns their stores (no franchisee/indie optimism in play here).
Not sure if it's a trend, but it was a good experience!
It has just as much space devoted to books as it did when it first opened over 30 years ago. Lego took over a few aisles, but the original Software Etc. section is now all books - a net zero change.
Other than that, it hasn't changed one bit. Frozen in the early 1990s. Original wallpaper and everything. It even smells the same.
When our friends and family visit, they all demand to visit this holy site - and they always leave with bags full of books.
That first sentence is a not a throw-away. I hope local, independent bookstores can continue to exist. And also that brick and mortar book stores continue to exist. But it's not like Amazon is illegally colluding to keep them down. independent bookstores just arent a very profitable businesses.
I don't disagree that bookstores are probably not that profitable, but I do think that Amazon is taking all the oxygen out of the room and not necessarily by being better, but have having a dragon hoard of cash that probably wasn't generated by selling books.
Because it's a business providing a consumer good - not a public institution.
> Having local independent bookstores enhances the quality of living for an entire community
How do they do that? They don't help me because they don't carry books I'm interested in at prices I'm willing to pay. It's serving so few people in the community it can't pay for rent.
Public access to books is subsidized already through libraries.
Which is to say that the marketplace as a whole exists for the benefit of the public. The entire point of regulation is to remediate issues that competition alone fails to address.
We don’t need to prop up an inferior (worse selection, higher price) book industry.
> Which is to say that the marketplace as a whole exists for the benefit of the public.
That’s a more generous characterization than I would use. Once again, if I’m forced to use worse goods at higher prices thats not a benefit to me.
This isn’t “smaller towns beating big corporations with the local government”. It’s “business owners in a small town stop competition using local government lobbying”.
A) Books?
B) Bricks and mortar book retailers?
C) Customers/readers?
Make suburbs great again!
Which is to say, almost nobody cares.
The value as a 3rd spaces inde bookstores provide to their communities are so crazy disconnected with their revenue model I'm amazed they've lasted this long. Your average inde bookstore isn't actually good (meaning core competency in a market) at anything they try to charge for. They're not good at being a store, they pay retail for logistics, they have no leverage with publishers, if they have food it's usually worse than the restaurant next door, if they have coffee it's usually worse than the starbucks across the street. The advantage of having boutique collection of books you can't get anywhere else evaporated when Amazon has every book in existence. Revenues for rare books evaporated thanks to ebay.
There's a reason Marx calls them the petite-borgeious.
If Walmart engaged in a price war with a small mom and pop bakery across the street I would be similarly unimpressed (disgusted, really).
A small bakery cannot engage in price manipulation for a meaningful time or volume to oust competition, that activity is completely different category.
There is no anti-trust law saying you can't have a sale the same day your competitors are having a party.
World domination is often just about seeing a bit beyond the obviousness-horizon that otherwise limits us all.
Or the Occam's Razor explanation that they weren't thinking about it at all, because customers who shop based on Independent Bookstore Day are a very different, negligibly small customer base who weren't going to be spending their money at Amazon anyway.
From 2024: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/books-and-authors/amazon-bo...
I just checked the two independent bookstores nearest me and neither one of them has any mention of it in their online presence. I've been a frequent customer of independent bookstores for years and never heard about this before. There's no Wikipedia page and Google Trends tells me there's not enough data to even give me a search history for this.
It makes a great headline and I'm sure the people who organize it are annoyed, but this might just be a case of ant meet boot. It's weirdly reassuring for organizers to think that Amazon specifically targeted them, but it seems more likely that they just... didn't even know it was happening.
IIRC it started at about the same time as 'Indie Record Store Day'; both are on Saturdays in April.
I shop at brick-and-mortars for whatever I can, and very much regret those gone missing because of the Great Monopolist. I really valued being able to examine many products before purchase.
I would match both, and i think most people on HN do too, but how many of you go out of their way (town) to avoid amazon or any large online-only distributor, like me?
I got a Costco membership last month. That with Instacart has been working h out very well.
I’ll use Amazon here and there but I’m making a big switch and canceling.
This was decided before this move, but it makes me feel much better in doing so.
Electronics - B&H
Computers - Microcenter
Musical Gear - Sweetwater (even though they got bought out by private equity, my sales agent always tries his best to do right by me)
It's not like they're having a Pope Francis Funerary Sale, there's nothing offensive or distasteful about this.
The reason for this is that both paper and printing here is cheap along with labor. The original author also licenses for cheap. The publishing houses however take a large cut increasing the cost of the book.
People get a hold of the epub and print them and sell them for 1/4th of the price sometimes 1/10th for new and even less for used.
The only way I see around this is digital libraries. Let people rent unlimited books (but like Netflix limited at a time) and take a monthly cut.
Of course piracy is cheaper lmao
Of course! The number of books outside educational material sold in this country with huge population is insignificant. And it is not much surprise since most people can't really afford much.
But at least mobile data is really cheap and Whatsapp is free, so people get all the information they care about just from this combo.
For me, locally - those never have anything else than top books on selling lists, selling them for the stock price. I am not a rich person and I can't justify paying ~ 30-40% more just to support them.
neilv•7h ago
So then they are having urgent meetings on "how did we possibly mess up this one, and look like jerks"?
Or is someone getting their bonus or promotion for being aggressive?
mcphage•6h ago
neilv•6h ago
morkalork•6h ago
Supermancho•6h ago
It's not mysterious. It hurts small stores that aren't aligned with Amazon and helps Amazon and small stores aligned with Amazon. Looks like typical Amazon bullying which has already been accepted since nobody is challenging the passthru book marketplace. Amazon used to sell books though, so that matters?
autobodie•5h ago
Supermancho•5h ago
zeroonetwothree•4h ago
After all, last year they didn't overlap?
Gathering6678•5h ago
saagarjha•4h ago
SpicyLemonZest•5h ago
One thing they would have concluded pretty quickly, though, is that there's no way for a large corporation to win a public argument with random small bookshops. If it was in fact inadvertent, writing a fact sheet with detailed refutations of every argument that they acted in bad faith would just make them look obnoxious. So Amazon says what they think is best to say, independent bookstores say they don't buy it, and that kinda has to be the end of it.