Confessions of a Bookseller

>The most important, basic, recurring issue of the day was money in every form. Every opportunity to get something for one price and sell it at a higher price, was the priority and the topic and what was important.

Which, ironically, is not much different by how several very celebrated literary authors where in their everyday life...

I would go even further : your description of the bookseller is the same as the one I would do. Focus is on money and on the appearance of being a cultural persona, even if a bookseller does not read more than most of their clients. To be fair, they must focus on money as the book business relies on very thin margins (no pun intended). They can give advices based on what they have read, but I completely disbelieve now that their opinion on any book has more value than anyone else. Moreover, I trust much more any author or any publisher on their blogs than a bookseller in front of me when they give opinions on books. I have seen more than once booksellers lying about a book to avoid ordering it for a customer (because it costs them money and the returns are not high enough). I don't believe also that it is only Amazon that crashed the bookshops and led to the disappearance of the bookseller as a cultural anchor point for communities. Those who were really literate and honest had more capabilities to survive and some are still there today, but those who were just posing as cultural figures are gone now. To sum up, bookshops are businesses and their main activity is to make money. If I want a cultural advice, theirs is still interesting but very low in my rankings.

ok - I have thought about this post.. I would amend it to say, the bookseller did not focus only on price to the customer. Price to the customer was important, and a constant effort to get the highest sales price with the least resentment after the purchase, was part of the effort. But in the later chapters of business life, what really took off was ways to handle cash flow by borrowing; every kind of credit, credit line, floating shipments, sale-priced books in bulk, overstock, and consignment shipments, were worked and tried and repeated. After the retail stores were stable, a warehouse started, and there was a LOT of activity. This particular bookseller sold books in South Africa, while the world was waging an (ultimately successful) economic boycott against the govt and businesses there. The rebuttal was always "we believe books should be available to everyone" but you know damn well there was extra money to be made.

The character of this bookseller included real book appreciation, and collections were important for real reasons previously mentioned... It was not a generic, corporate environment, it was instead filled with people with real interests and specialties, and almost always an appreciation for broad areas of book meaning, craft and lore. There was freedom of thought and association -- it was not missing. Borders Books and Barnes & Noble of the early nineties were the nightmare to these people, and that was one step before Amazon dot com, which was (and is) held in open contempt by many that had experience with the older ways.

Pique.

What do you use besides ublock origin?

do we know whether the nag popups work well though?

And they're infuriatingly hard to block as well. But I suppose a single conversion is worth 10,000 annoyed visitors.

Unfortunately, it's because they still work. The designer may not want them, but the marketers do.

I don't think designers want them. The data probably shows that it increases conversions or whatever metric, so the product owners and business pushes the designers to jam in the dark ux patterns.

Hey, I wanted to read the article but I couldn't make the subscription ad disappear from my phone. They lost a reader right there.