I spent decades browsing bookstores with their paltry inventory of bestsellers, occasionally resorting to ordering a book through them. I like Amazon a lot better (and the prices are far better, too). I buy a ton of books from Amazon.
I don't miss the bookstores.
I've seen other bookstores which at least have a quiet librarian, but frankly I don't know how half the bookstores in Toronto stay afloat.
Amazon has way more selection, including cross-listings from self publishers (which for some obscure topics and authors, is the only way). They don't try to bundle a communist manifesto with your order, and they actually list some details about the book which even somebody who's read it might have missed.
One thing I maybe miss a little is being able to feel and see the print quality of the book in advance, but I think that's more a matter of bias than a judgement of the quality of the contained words.
Besides, just today I was reading HN and saw a reference to a book. I popped over to Amazon and bought a copy. I never would have heard of the book by any bookstore proprietor (and it was published in the days before those bookstores vanished).
Amazon has hardly eliminated serendipity.
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -- Haruki Murakami
Today everyone (not just those near a well-stocked bookstore with a good librarian) can browse and order from literally millions of titles.
The (relatively few) people who used to have a well stocked bookstore with a good librarian nearby are probably a bit worse off under Amazon. Everyone else is a lot better off.
This one, in particular, would be a lot more powerful from a librarian.
It seems like if the key value added is talking to the people, requiring a whole bookstore to do so was useful when you needed the bookstore itself but now it's a huge add on cost and hassle.
Effectively they were bundling two reasonably distinct services into one. One of which is now served (generally) better by Amazon.
So with that in mind, could a business be built entirely around the extra value added? Real, personalised recommendations that come from speaking to someone who loves the topic.
Pay for some time to speak to them, and get recommendations.
This could be extended into other fields too, films, tv series and games are the main ones that spring to mind.
The one-on-one approach does not scale. We already have the many-to-many form of this (goodreads, for example).
It's worth noting that what we had previously was effectively a store manager working part time as what I'm suggesting. Your hourly cost there is also (if full time) equivalent to well into the top decile of earners in the UK.
> The one-on-one approach does not scale.
Does it need to scale? The previous setup was already a one on one approach. The advantage of it now is that location is not important and I could talk immediately to a recommender pretty much anywhere rather than only the one at my local book store.
You'd probably need more than 5 minutes for the first set of recommendations, right? If they can give you 5 recs in the first 5 minutes of talking to you, then those recommendations aren't necessarily so personalized (or, at least, the nominal lift above crowd-sourced recs is dubious).
> what we had previously was effectively a store manager working part time as what I'm suggesting.
Good point. Let's call it $20/hour, then? Starts to sound a little better. (but, of course, without a physical footprint & actual books to sell, you need to spend more on marketing, so you need to charge more).
> The advantage of it now is that location is not important and I could talk immediately to a recommender...
I get the appeal. If I was provided reliable, way-better-than-crowdsourced recommendations, then that would be worth a lot to me - easily enough to justify a one-time fee (say, $30) and then $1 per book or $5 per series. I doubt that's possible, though =( Even really close friends with really similar tastes to mine, with whom I have regular long conversations about books, still have occasional misses when the recommend books to me, and vice-versa.
Their strategy is lift the burden of closing sales for their employees thanks to seamless payment (or even better, Amazon Go technology) and have them focus on adding value through conversation and recommendations.
I'm just outside of the city limits, so a library card would cost me $130 / year. I don't spend much more than that on books plus Amazon ships it to me, so it's less expensive in the end.
I was pretty excited by the fact that I could buy my own books when I got my first job. I still miss Borders.
Never seen that anywhere else.
Second hand bookshops are a different matter though.
Some chain bookstores certainly had a few good staff members, but the selection and consistent quality of the staff was lacking.
I will also humbly suggest that independent bookstores were great places to find likeminded people back when being a geek/nerd wasn't trendy.
Anyway, the internet has solved a lot of the recommendation and curation problems of the past, so the independent bookstores have had to struggle to find a way to add value such that people actually shop there. It's possible, but much tougher than the past, imho.
What if you never see great book on the shelf because it's an indie book and not published by one of the big 5? That's really where an independent bookshop comes into play. In this way Amazon operates closer to an independent because it pushes indie books as well.
It was the only place I could go to easily be exposed to technologies and products that I had never heard of. Also great where the game development books that would have a CD just full of the weirdest and craziest games that they got from who knows where.