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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I think they simply don't know what to do next. In the past century, you could write a book with good content, put it on a shelf, and people would pay money for it.

Then at some point, book stores stopped existing. Some turned into gift stores where the book was some decoration you'd put on the shelf to add aesthetic to the room.

So a lot of things went digital. But nobody wants to pay for digital information. You'd think almanacs would be popular in the era of overinformation.

What channel next? YT shorts? TikTok? Do farmers even use LinkedIn? How do you deal with bots that grab all the information you put out there and repackage it into a $20/month subscription?

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Book stores did not stop existing. They are everywhere. Book sales are up in recent times.

Print book sales are down, although not as much as people want to believe. Book stores are making a comeback but in terms of number of books on shelves I'd say the average one is ~50% less. We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines. We have not returned to that, and certainly books that you'd pick up on a whim like an end-cap item have reasonably suffered for it, or increased their prices to fairly insane levels.

>> We had a real heyday in the late 90s where a Barnes and Nobles would have a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for, plus multiple rows of magazines.

I don't know if there was ever a bookstore that ever had a copy of almost any book you could reasonably be looking for. Maybe Powell's back in the day if you counted the technical bookstore along with the mother ship. Certainly not Barnes & Noble. There are still multiple rows of magazines at B&N today, including ones on Linux, programming, network admin, Raspberry Pi, etc.

The one I go to is the same size as the ones I went to 20 years ago and an order of magnitude larger than the mall bookstores I went to 40 years ago. Although some of that space is taken up by the coffee shop, Legos, and vinyl records.

Barnes & Nobles and Borders were both the ultimate in retail bookstores and also the beginning of the end of retail book stores. They killed local bookstores, and then Amazon killed them.

But none of what you're describing actually happened. The big chains didn't kill local bookstores at all -- mom-and-pop bookstores are still ubiquitous -- and many of them are actually doing better than they used to due to the ability to list their inventory on Amazon, AbeBooks, etc.

And B&N itself is doing just fine, and is opening new locations. Borders is the only major chain that failed to adapt. Other large book retailers are also still going strong, e.g. Books-A-Million.

Maybe in some places. Growing up there was no bookstore. We had a library, and a mall far away, and there were some small book stores at the mall that continued to do just fine as B&N and Borders grew. And while everyone says Amazon killed bookstores… maybe some. But what I saw were malls dying anyway, and downtown rents growing to the point where selling just books wasn’t enough to cover costs.

They didn't, you're right, but book stores themselves are on the decline [1]. Borders brick and mortar footprint is gone in the U.S. and they used to be the #2 bookseller. Barnes and Noble is holding on, thankfully. I love physical books and just the quiet ambience of a good bookstore.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/do-not-turn-t...

Despite the name "farmers" I doubt the majority of customers were farmers, at least not in the last 50 years or so.

Over the 200 years, most of the readers may have been farmers, or at least lived or worked on farms. That would have been much of the population back then.

Bro book sales are at a record high right now and barnes and noble is opening lots of stores

> Do farmers even use LinkedIn?

Farmers don't even use the Almanac, because it's not accurate. These things are all 50/50. A coin toss in their predictions.

Well that just obviously isn't true. If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things? If nothing else, natural market forces would simply prop up the farmers who aren't wasting time and money following a completely inaccurate book.

In statistics, two things are simple: predicting the very next step, and predicting what happens in 100,000 steps. It's the part in between that's tough. Weather is a function of statistics, essentially. It's why we can tell what the weather will be like tomorrow, and why we can tell that La Nina is going to affect us this year, but why we can't tell what the weather will be like on a Thursday 4 weeks from now.

> If it were, who'd keep buying the stupid things?

The same people who buy books about healing crystals, who donate to televangelists, who go to reiki "healers" and chiropractors, who believe in tarot firmly, etc.

Those people aren't in something resembling a zero-sum game, so they don't really make sense. Chiropractors sell back cracks, and the people buying that get exactly what they want.

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