When Amazon Killed Bookstores
5th March 2019
Sarah Hoyt points ot that bookstores were in the process of hanging themselves when Amazon appeared and gave them a push.
I too had the experience, in the 1990s, of never being able to find something worth reading, much less buying, in an actual physical bookstore. My wife and I would instead go to places like Half Price Books in order to get stuff that was ‘out of print’ but eventually migrated from people’s closets and attics.
It hasn’t gotten any better since. Nowadays I only buy books by people that I know or books that have been recommended by people I trust. That’s not a big world.
Which is fine — I’ve got a public library and I’m not afraid to use it; even a weekly trip through their New Adult NonFiction listing (now conveniently on the Internet) gives me a request list of a dozen or so.
Amazon has been a boon for people like me because it allows oddball people to publish stuff without the gladiatorial contest of going through a major publisher.
March 6th, 2019 at 11:45
Well, another thing that killed bookstores is the dumbing down of society. Book sales show an annual increase, but the increase is far less than the population increase. “I’ll wait for the movie.” used to be a joke. People are reading more from Twitter than from published books.
And they voted for Occasional-Cortex. No surprise.