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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

I’m suspicious that Amazon sells fewer books than a good physical bookstore. In a bookstore, people find books they didn’t know they want, and I’ve never found anything interesting on Amazon. Similarly, Amazon does not produce the “whole I’m already here, I might as well buy something else” effect.

I’ve long thought that the publishers have has their whole business model wrong in quite a few ways.

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Ugh, this is going to sound pretentious, but here goes:

When you follow a subject beyond a surface/casual level of understanding there is very little you just 'discover' at a bookstore, unless it's one of a few specialty shops. You follow journals, publishers' catalogs, and forums which not only keep you current with new releases, but also expose you to back-catalog and out of print material. And nobody beats Amazon for carrying all of that material.

Writing tip, if you think something is going to sound pretentious, then replace all instances of 'you' with 'I'. Usually that will help with the tone. I find I sometimes tend to assume my own personal experiences will match everyone else's experience, which usually is not the case in the end. So, instead of trying to convince people what the "right way" to bookshop is, just give your perspective as another point to the conversation.

The part you’re missing is that virtually everyone follows virtually everything at a surface/casual level which keeps that “discovery” alive.

It's not pretentious, it's true. The "Programming" section of chain bookstores would always be not-very-many shelves of "Teach Yourself X in Y Days" or "X for Dummies" books. I don't remember ever seeing any of the seminal books for noobies like "The C Programming Language" or SICP at Barnes & Noble/Borders/Chapter 11.

I did pickup quite a few good computer related books at The Strand, then again they have millions of books on site to browse. In fact i did get my C programming book there, my awk book and also a fun book called my googlewhack adventure. Also a book by microsoft publishing that gives a bottom to top view of computers (i forget the title) and an absurd Pop-Up book about computers and telecoms in the 80s

Was it Charles Petzold's Code? If so that's a wonderful book.

In Bedford MA there was a store called (IIRC) Softpro which was all software/CS/etc. I was sad when it closed, but what good is a store if the only time you can access it is once a quarter when you're in town for a project review?

Yeah - it is just a simple matter of numbers as opposed to pretentiouses or humblebragging. The number of people interested in a book is highest for the surface/casual level and it is seldom that there will be enough demand for often expensive and slow to move texts. There isn't much call for say republishing of authenic 19th century surgical technique books. Maybe some casual readers would buy it at a lower price point but almost certainly not if it is several hundred dollars.

I was actually thinking of fiction when I wrote that. I’ve only rarely seen a physical store that was good for browsing technical literature.

Amazon does offer recommendations based on an algorithm while a book store either has similar books all in one section ordered in a more traditional fashion (maybe alphabetical).

> I’ve never found anything interesting on Amazon

Probably a lack of your own imagination. There’s a lifetime of interesting books on Amazon.

Same for me. I've found plenty of interesting stuff on Amazon.

From the context, I think they were talking about discovery, not whether the books are available for purchase on Amazon.

Personally I don't think I've ever become aware of an interesting book via Amazon, but I've also never used it for discovery. Certainly you have to troll through a lot of nonsense results even when you have a good idea of what you're looking for.

> There’s a lifetime of interesting books on Amazon

To the extent that the masses of reprinted-as-a-book Wikipedia articles, CC-licensed and public-domain content, or even GPT-generated books don’t sneak into Amazon’s selection.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/27/fake-books-sol...

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