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Comment by profunctor | Hacker News Reader

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...

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