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Comment by gwern | Hacker News Reader

Is it so unrealistic? When I wanted a copy of _Beowulf_ in 2003 or so, what I did was I wandered into my local Borders and found it, and compared 5 or 6 different books; I ultimately settled on Heaney's translation which I liked the bits I read the most of, and then picked the volume with the most additional historical essays providing context. And _Beowulf_ is surely less read than Homer.

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Not really sure.

The problem with bookstores is your inventory only ever increases. They probably made some cost calculation that carrying multiple translations of Homer translated to a few more sales a year. It's a hard business. I've wandered in there and found esoteric history, the kind that I was surprised they even carried. You add Homer #2, something like that gets axed.

Maybe they could stop selling the kind of books that are really big for a year and then nobody ever reads again, but it can't be easy.

That was 15 years ago, though -- a veritable millennium in the internet age. Although Amazon was around, a lot of people still accessed the internet over a cable modem (or even dial-up!) or some other technology which didn't provide ubiquitous internet access. Most people surfed the internet from their desktop, as opposed to using their phones from a wide variety of places from the couch to the toilet.

Why does that matter? Borders didn't shrink in size physically just because the Internet got bigger. And the B&N that replaced it was just as big.

(a) higher sales volume and higher profitibality meant that they could afford some loss leaders. (B) online not being as popular meant they were still a market for niches. Today niche interests are almost all entirely online (C) The one big thing people are ignoring is that with the abundance of alternate media, books in general are almost certainly being read less. It's not just sales but actual consumptions of books that have likely dropped. The number of readers of certain niches has almost certainly reduced.

Heaney's traslation of Beowulf is a masterpiece in its own right.

Yeah, it was in hindsight definitely the right choice. No regrets there! I read that copy a good 4 or 5 times.

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