Covid forced bookstores online. Can they survive? | Hacker News Reader

Covid forced bookstores online. Can they survive?

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28 pointsprostoalex33 comments

Sadly, bookstores are a dying breed. When I visited Pittsburgh last year, I only found one (!!!) downtown. It was a small hole-in-the-wall, dusty, and a disorganized mess — just how I like my bookstores to be. I bought a couple of books (I always buy books as souvenirs) and I tipped the owner, a young man, maybe in his 30s, an extra 20 dollars and he was surprised to hear that I wanted to support his store. I really hope it survives the pandemic. In West LA, where I live, bookstores are equally rare. With Borders shuttering it’s doors, and my local Barnes and Noble closing, there’s just one bookstore left in Santa Monica. This is sad, and maybe says more about our culture than it should.

I fear that, with bookstores, books themselves will go too. There don't seem to be enough of us that prefer printed books over "e-books" to keep the business model profitable.

On demand printing is pretty cool and wasn't really available in the past. The Internet also revitalized the used book market. I buy almost all of my books used.

On demand printing has also been horrible for textbooks/monographs, Springer being one of the worst. Very few copies are printed, but they serve as an important means of preserving this knowledge, and books that do not survive a single reading do not instill confidence in the longevity of cheap print on demand. They aren't any less expensive now either. I also buy most books used, often to avoid these terrible newer printings.

Mass market paperbacks (and maybe trade paperbacks) could go away soon, and I don't really see anything wrong with that. It's super wasteful to print and ship these effectively disposable copies. I think hardbacks have a better case for hanging on longer.

Do people really throw away paperbacks?

I like paperbacks much more than hardbacks. They are easier to read, store, and move. Hardbacks are pretty, but less practical for me.

Not that I buy a lot these days but I certainly donate many of them (and many of those probably end up thrown out). Yes, they're more compact than hardcovers but I still have limited space in my house.

> They are easier to read, store, and move.

I have the opposite experience in every category.

Read: For reading, I much prefer hardcover. The print is generally larger, and the book doesn't usually just collapse in on itself. (Sometimes a hardcover will be too stiff, but unless I'm willing to break the spine, a paperback is always 'stiff' in this sense.) I can't read fiction as easily in bed with a hardcover, although it's doable (and this is exactly why I've replaced paperback with the kindle version anyway).

Store: You can certainly store more paperbacks in the same space, but in my experience, it's messier and can quickly become unmanageable. I'm a big believer in quality over quantity. My library shelves are full. When new books come in, old books go out. The limited space makes me be more critical about which books I buy and which books I keep. That they're essentially all hardcover means I can literally see every book I own without getting up from my desk. They're all easy to access - just pull them right off the shelf. If I had less space, I think I'd rather have less books.

Move: I gave up on paperbacks because I was moving every six months or less for a period of about six years. Having these large boxes of books that I kept mostly 'just because' became tedious. I eventually just gave them all away. Granted, having an equivalent weight of hardcover would have been just as tedious, but they'd likely have had more value to me. Most of those paperbacks I would never have read again.

> Do people really throw away paperbacks?

I'll throw away hardcovers if I can't find another home for them. It's uncommon, but it happens.

This book really changed my relationship with books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book

It taught me to have expectations of books beyond just asking myself, 'Do I like this or not?.' It's mostly for reading non-fiction, but it's useful for fiction too.

Along with that change, I also decided if a book is worth owning a personal, physical copy of, it's worth making sure that copy is high quality.

Books, newspapers, magazines. Old physical medium is slowly phasing itself out. It's sad time is moving on but if you told me in the 90s I can have a single flatsheet off paper that will get the latest news from the internet daily I would be amazed. With phones I have a flatsheet that gets new pages by touching a screen. A virtual keyboard appears. I feel like I'm in the future.

Maybe we shouldn't look down on the progress we all tried so hard to make. It's not bad..

But it opens the door to centralized censorship and control of the present and past unlike ever before.

Before the web, centralization meant you couldn't get published unless you made a one sided deal if you were lucky with a publisher. You would have to buy 2,000 copies yourself and try to sell that out of a car.

When amazon opened that up it allowed anyone to publish and now we have other smaller sites like smashworlds that offer similiar.

Things are now so much more open as a publisher.

On the selling side you had smaller book stores being pushed out by Chapters. Chapters bought up many book chains and pushed out many smaller shops with better prices.

When Amazon came in they were fighting against the big box stores and they won.

Things appear centralized with Amazon but you can sell your ebook from anywhere (from your site/app/newsletter) you couldn't do that before. Everyone wants easy Amazon sales.

For all the advantages of reading with a screen, it hasn’t yet supplanted all the benefits of a printed book. For instance, flipping back and forth between two or three pages is much easier and faster with a printed book. Put your finger in the book, read, flip back, read.

Versus, say, a reader app: Bookmark the page. Go to the other page (perhaps by “Go to page...”), bookmark that page. Now click “bookmarks” and select the first page, read, click bookmarks, select the second page, read. And that assumes you don’t already have so many bookmarks that you have to scroll.

I can write in a book. I can forget it behind and it’ll probably be there (and if not, it’s probably cheaply replaced). I can lend it. etc

I love my e-reader, but I still need (and love) books.

ebooks are fine if you're mostly just reading linear text. They're also mostly good if they're just a reference that you're looking things up in. They tend to be less good when there are a lot of photos/graphics (though I've mostly made peace with well-designed guidebooks), footnotes, and things you want to bookmark a lot like cookbooks.

Aye. My reader (which is one of clutch of Sony Readers I'm keeping alive, which for various reasons ended up my preferred reader) is an excellent substitute for a stack of novels I'll read front to back, and that's it. The reader wins on weight and volume, which for a stack of novels is a serious inconvenience.

For everything else thus far, the paper version wins.

> When I visited Pittsburgh last year, I only found one (!!!) downtown.

To be fair, my impression of downtown Pittsburgh (that is, the golden triangle -- this was a few years ago, so things may have changed) was it didn't have much residential density. Things seemed relatively quiet after 5 and the area didn't seem to have much foot traffic. I also was given to understand most Pitt and CMU folks (the intelligentsia of the city) don't tend to live downtown. I did manage to visit a comic book store.

Brick and mortar bookstores do require a certain amount of foot traffic to be economically feasible. Although Amazon Prime is hard to beat for sheer size of inventory, below MSRP prices and fast/free shipping, booksellers still have a few cards up their sleeve. The booksellers near me that were doing ok pre-COVID had great browsing experiences (well-curated collections, nice furniture and adjoining cafes) and frequent book events by authors. Sadly with COVID these advantages were lost. (also, I hate to say this, but customer service in a bookstore generally doesn't really make or break it. I rarely interact with the staff.)

Since March, I've bought a couple of books from Bookshop.org out of principle. The books were pricier (closer to MSRP), shipping was more expensive and slower, and there was no other value-add, but I knew I was paying their true sustainable economic cost.

I guess the real problem isn't that Bookshop is expensive, but that Amazon is so cheap (and convenient).

(also, despite what purists say, Amazon's b&m bookstores are actually really good -- the curation is excellent because it's based on analytics. So Amazon is encroaching on b&m booksellers' territory in that way too.)

What I've noticed is most bookshops are now coffee shops that happen to sell books.

Despite having read hundreds of books in my life, I've failed to discover the sacred connection between me and the physical book that some avid readers like to ramble about.

Sure, some books are nice. Some are even more comfortable to use (books with lots of images or diagrams) than ebooks. Sometimes the typography is really something. But they're still ink-covered dead trees, they take up lots of space, weigh tens or hundreds of kilograms, are a pain to move between apartments, are an even bigger pain to pack for a vacation.

High resolution e-ink displays are just as nice to look at, and ebooks are much easier to self-publish without all the middlemen.

It's sad to see the bookstore go as an interesting kind of place, but I won't miss books at all.

Ebooks work better for some things, less well for others.

I don't wholly disagree with your overall sentiment though. I find there's a certain fetishization of even cheap paperbacks, rather than their content, that I don't buy into. There are certainly some types of books that lend themselves better to print than tablet and some that are designed to be art in their own right. But, for reading a novel, I'd rather use an ebook reader for the most part.

I do most of my reading via ebook these days. Physical books are reserved for either things that either can't be read as well in ebook form (House of Leaves, S.), comics (someday we'll get color eink), things picked up third hand for a dollar, or books I'd like to be able to lend. My family rejoiced when we no one longer packed a suitcase of just books for the beach.

But there's still something about bookstores, and the ability to browse that is wholely unique. The experience on Amazon, or where ever else just isn't the same. It's too overwhelming, and the tiny pictures and titles aren't as good for quick browsing. If I know what I want the experience of a book store is much worse.

I find that ebooks are ok for paperback, anything not particularly technical.

I'd want to gouge my eyes out whenever I try to read code examples on an ebook reader. It either messes with the formatting, or shrunk the font down to retain the examples.

And of course, art books are generally no go for ebooks.

All retail outside of large supermarkets is disappearing. It's impossible to compete against online services that are cheaper to run, more scalable, and overall mode comfortable.

The bookstores that will survives are the ones with comfortable couches and a cozy athmosphere where you can sit down and read or study for a couple of hours instead of going to a café or a pub. Entertainment has not been fully digitalised yet.

I don't necessarily see that "impossibility" as a bad thing. The idea that the cost of actual goods are being driven down is always good for the people buying. I feel like we're reaching the point where retail has to start charging directly for the value they bring to the table instead of trying to put it in the cost of the goods. Because you can't compete with huge companies that operate on super thin margins and scale.

If your value as a bookstore is as a 3rd space or a co-working space then charge for that. Don't try to hide it in the price of books or food. We have coffee shops that charge a cover if you want to work there. If the value of your bike shop is the show-rooming then charge for that. I would absolutely pay to try out different bikes and if you charge the same as everyone else for the actual bike I have no reason not to buy from you.

I don't necessarily disagree but an admission fee to go into a store seems like it would be a pretty big hurdle to expect people to climb over. There have been discussions of the showrooming problem since ecommerce got big and no one has really been able to systematically address it.

Exactly. They need to provide an extra value. It can be a cafe with couches or brining book authors a few times a week to talk about their book, etc. I know at least one local book store that do both and pre-covid it was always packed with people.

All retail outside of large supermarkets is disappearing. It's impossible to compete against online services that are cheaper to run, more scalable, and overall mode comfortable.

Really? http://investors.bestbuy.com/investor-relations/news-and-eve...

Best-Buy is the show-room for what's on Amazon.

There's a bookstore near me with a cafe (that has alcohol), and runs a pub trivia night. I had to fight myself not to pick up something every time I went in for that.

I love bookstores but they really don't seem to be providing any value when they are online. At least for me, I buy about 100 books a year from Amazon and 5-10 books a year from physical book stores. The value of physical book stores is when you can find something interesting by browsing through them and then you just want to read the physical book right away. For the best book stores (like City Lights in SF) I find books that I never would find otherwise. But whenever I learn about a new book online, Amazon will get me the book the fastest (for me usually Kindle, the physical book if I'm willing to wait) so it's just a much better experience.

We've tried to continue patronizing independent bookstores during the pandemic, but it's not surprising they are struggling (our favorite recently closed). The value-add over Amazon was always the warm atmosphere, personalized recommendations and the sense that you might discover a great book you didn't know about while perusing the shelves. Very hard to recreate that online, and independent shops can't compete with Amazon's shipping speed - so you're left with no value-add other than the store still being there in the future. Sad state of affairs.

Not giving my money to Bezos is value-add enough for me.

I'm pretty sure Amazon forced bookshops online.

(For younger viewers: Amazon used to just sell books)

Or out of business. Although the big chains and even large local discounters started putting the squeeze on small indies before Amazon forced most of them out of business in turn.

Do they have to? I haven't bought a physical book for myself in more than a decade and I'm surely not alone.

Not every industry has to survive. Not every industry will.

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