Gone 10 years, World’s Biggest Bookstore still grips readers
thestar.com
thestar.com
Its really an enjoyable experience.
OpAmp in LA was awesome, sadly in the past tense.
I've come to deduce that the death of bookstores is nothing more than a trope pushed by tech fetishists.
Last Thursday evening, I sat in the cafe of a chain bookstore in a major American city while my wife was browsing, and counted the people. There were close to 70 in my field of view, and in the 40ish minutes I sat there, over 100 people came in. The line at the checkout never had fewer than five people in it, and often more than a dozen.
A couple of weeks ago, I drove past my local bookstore (also a big chain) before it opened, and there was dozens and dozens of people waiting in line to get in.
Books aren't dead. Reading isn't dead. Acknowledging that there are people who enjoy different things than you do is dead.
It is true that the bookstore business has faced a lot of downturns: indie bookstores were really hurt by the big chain stores, Barnes & Nobles and Borders in the '90s, then Amazon and online shopping hurt them all some more. But the indie scene is stronger than it was, say, 15 years ago. A lot more smaller and niche shops have been opening up (at least in US cities I'm familiar with).
At the moment, I would have to go to Arlington for a Barnes and Noble: two in DC closed for reasons I never heard. One in Bethesda that was always pretty busy closed because the landlord wanted it out.
I worry about the condition of bookstores. I hope I'm wrong to do so.
I'm always
Oh:
Opened in 1980 in the former Olympia Bowling Alley building, the World’s Biggest Bookstore may not, in fact, have been the world’s biggest bookstore. It was a marketing gambit by Jack Cole, who owned Coles and SmithBooks, and thought “a massive bookstore would do well for Toronto,” as his son David told the National Post in 2014. He paid a reported $2.4 million for the property
Aside from a few years during the pandemic, I've been buying books there regularly for four decades. The neighborhood has evolved over time, and some large stores that stocked only new books have closed. But the market for used and antiquarian books must be strong, as many of the old stores are still in business and quite a few new ones have opened in recent years.
Most of the books are in Japanese, and the neighborhood, despite being centrally located, doesn't attract many foreign tourists.
Absolutely not. The place was pretty much windowless, with large piles of mainstream books from major publishers.
I've not been back for ages, only going once since I was a kid and it no longer seemed as magical. It's apparently moved a few doors down the road, so I guess the store is a bit bigger now, but I certainly doubt it's anywhere close to being the world's largest anymore - I've been to several in China that are significantly bigger, e.g. Shenzhen Book City which has multiple branches in the same city and all of them are massive. The flagship one in Futian is basically an entire shopping mall with the bookshop at the centre and a few smaller shops and food stalls around the periphery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0onFRIQrGQ
That video starts just slightly north of where this bookstore and the stores you mentioned were, and goes up past Bloor.
It is sad to see how sterile, and how deserted (in terms of people and businesses), that area has since become, especially as somebody who had experienced it decades ago.
It might have been at some point, but by the time it closed I think Powell's was bigger.
The largest was Barnes & Noble at 105 5th Ave 10003 at 154250 sq ft but it closed.
All three are gone and it feels like a tragedy.
I bought dozens of O'Reilly books from that location over the years.
It had a great selection of SciFi books.
https://apnews.com/article/independent-bookstores-membership...
Page 8 (PDF)
https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/20-068_c19963e7-...
Please note that I never claimed they had “Amazon numbers.” I never claimed that they were as prevalent as they were pre-e-commerce. I’m merely stating that a “slow but firm downward trend” is not correct.
> Please note that I never claimed they had “Amazon numbers.” I never claimed that they were as prevalent as they were pre-e-commerce.
You seem to be arguing different points here (despite the quotes). They are talking about the bookstores returning to their own pre-Amazon numbers.
However, after an initial decline due to competition from e-commerce, independent bookstores have been growing since 2009.
The person who replied to me would have been correct if they were posting their comment in the mid-2000s, but their statement has not been true since 2009.
I provided sources and data to back myself up and nobody arguing against my point has.
I have not at any point changed the argument I am making nor have I moved any goal posts. The entirety of my argument is that in recent years independent booksellers have been on an upward trend. I never made any claim about their sales compared to Amazon. I never claimed that the industry never faced decline. I am merely fact checking the original statement that the industry is allegedly in a downward trend.
Some point in the early-2010s they rented a retail space across from the main store and moved their engineering and computer-related books into a technical annex, and topped all the shelves with vintage equipment and old computers.
It got folded back into the main store around 2014, and the selection is still good, but I really liked it having its own cozy, dedicated space.
Awesome to see soo many remembering that cat. Also,
> I was a programmer for Powell's for 22 years. One thing I programmed into the lookup stations at the main store was a search for fup got you a picture of him.
Sadly there's very few technical book stores left in the US. The only two I can think of are:
- Ada books in Seattle, WA
- MIT Press bookstore in Cambridge, MA
Are there any others that still exit?
And Stacy's Books in Cupertino and Market Street in San Francisco, and the last holdout, Digital Guru off the Lawrence Expressway.
Toronto used to have Toronto Computer Books up until the mid-2000s (on Yonge, a few blocks up the street from the WBB of this article):
* https://www.profilecanada.com/companydetail.cfm?company=2524...
Bought a bunch of Perl stuff as well as the Sendmail 'bat book' there, back in the day.