Horizon

I can't imagine buying a book any more that wasn't used, remaindered, or from an online retailer. The idea of using a Borders-style bookstore for anything other than a browse of the stock and maybe a latte seems incredible now given the discount you can get with no-sales-tax, no-shipping-price Amazon.com. I think Amazon and its Internet fellows have been the single best thing to happen for book customers in the last 10 years (whether they've been a good thing for authors is a different matter, of course).

There are some great independent bookstores out here so I usually try to find what I need there before going to Amazon. I'm happy for Amazon to take business away from chains but feel lucky to live next to the last three or four good independent bookstores in the nation. Sad.

er...make that SOME OF the last three or four...etc.

I find I purchase most of my books from Half Price Books, an efficiently-run chain located in Texas and most of the mountain states. The next largest population probably comes from Amazon, with the two most pleasant big-boxes in town (Borders and the independent BookPeople) ranking third, and Eisenbraun's, Powell's, abebooks.com, EBay, Amazon.fr, and local used indies filling in the gaps.

There was an excellent article in The Atlantic back in the middle of 2001 that managed to convince me that on the whole the big box bookstore chains are a force for good, not evil. Pity the article's not free.

on the whole the big box bookstore chains are a force for good, not evil.

Whatever the moral or economic issues involved, I seriously doubt there is a Barnes and Noble anywhere in the world, no matter how big, that rivals Cody's or Moe's for the sorts of things I typically buy. It bugs me to see so much shelf space devoted to 24 copies of Bridgette Jones' Diary (a book I like, I might add), and only one copy of one random novel (often not even the most famous one) of, say, Bulgakov, as well as plenty of authors more famous.

It's a big improvement over the old mall shoebox stores they used to have, and I realize they are trying to make a buck and it's supply and demand, etc. Fine. But why should I shop there?

...with the exception of technical books. For those Barnes and Noble is a useful browsing, try-before-you-buy spot. Sometimes I get impatient and actually buy one there.

But why should I shop there

Well, yes -- if you've got better, you go there.

Whether or not you shop in a bookstore, regardless of how poor it might be, the question I kept asking myself was: What kind of a town doesn't have a bookstore?

What kind of a town doesn't have a bookstore?

A small one. A rural one.

In 1990, within a seventy-five mile radius of my hometown there were two Waldenbooks storefronts, one B. Dalton's, one small-but-friendly used and rare shop, and three or four romance trade-in places.

One really nice thing about used bookstores is being able to find entire genres that have passed out of fashion. For some reason chrestomathies and graduated readers for foreign language instruction fell out of favor several decades ago. This means that the mustier the bookstore, the more likely you are to score one.

Whatever the moral or economic issues involved, I seriously doubt there is a Barnes and Noble anywhere in the world, no matter how big, that rivals Cody's or Moe's for the sorts of things I typically buy.

But I bet Amazon is better than all of them put together.

Whether or not you shop in a bookstore, regardless of how poor it might be, the question I kept asking myself was: What kind of a town doesn't have a bookstore?

A town with Internet access and a post office?

A small one. A rural one.

As I said, my hometown (pretty rural) has never been big enough to support a bookstore. But the small "cities" that constitute the "hub" of the region easily exceed a population of 50,000. And they used to have a Waldens, B. Dalton's, a couple tiny independents, and a wonderful used book place called the Book Barn. They are all gone.

There is just something wrong with that picture.

But I bet Amazon is better than all of them put together.

As far as selection goes, actually it isn't. Especially if you factor in University Press Books.

Amazon is a good back up, because they deliver faster than the shops around here get special orders.

Amazon is great for browsing and finding new things you might like, though. More so than probably any bookstore could be.

As far as selection goes, actually it isn't. Especially if you factor in University Press Books.

I should say that I'm using 'Amazon' as shorthand for 'internet suppliers in general'. I agree that sometimes Amazon the specific company doesn't always have the best price or the exact book I want. But Powells etc. usually step into the gap quickly enough. And you can usually order from University houses directly over the 'Net too.

Stupid (corny? nostalgic?) as it sounds, I like to touch books.

And you can usually order from University houses directly over the 'Net too.

Yeah, but being able to browse a whole shelf full of books on medieval literature or Russian morphology in nice colorful covers instead of drab library binding...I just think that's cool. I just like it. It makes me feel good. People like me deserve to window shop too. So, like, stop trying to harsh my mellow man.

City Lights was open on the evening of September 11 when nearly everyone else had closed up shop early. We went there for refuge from the fear and isolation. So did other people. It was a sanctuary. I defy Amazon to provide that.

Incidentally, on the subject of browsing, I think Amazon's search feature, although it only works on a small percentage of their stock, is an astonishing breakthrough tool if used imaginatively (and probably not for the reasons that the designers originally intended); see here for amusing abuse of same.

I defy Amazon to provide that.

If you're going to give City Lights credit for things that have nothing to do particularly with it being a bookstore, then I'll grant you all the concessions you want. You can't use the restrooms at Amazon either, or call AAA from the lobby.

If you're going to give City Lights credit for things that have nothing to do particularly with it being a bookstore, then I'll grant you all the concessions you want. You can't use the restrooms at Amazon either, or call AAA from the lobby.

Martha's just going to have to get used to spending trying times loitering in Bed Bath and Beyond.

There's nothing like a browse in a second hand bookshop. Control freaks may conclude that Amazon is heaven but nothing beats a browse in a second-hand bookshop. Chain bookshops are depressing places: you see, up close, the crap that's selling well, and notice how cheap and nasty the Penguin Modern Classics are becoming. Graham Greene's oeuvre is now more disgustingly presented than ever for example. I agree though, if you want something definite, then the net will get it for you.

Browsing provides different kinds of information from text searching. Browsing is a source of things you didn't know you wanted to know, and a way of testing your assumptions about sources against serendipity and/or other people's categorization methods. It frees you from having to know precisely what you want in order to get what you need. (Apologies to Messrs. Jagger & Richards.) Computer searches that only give you what you ask for can be bad for research, after all. I've read that there are even lines of cases in the U.S. appellate courts that have diverged according to which text search terms the law clerks used in the online research databases. Not that Amazon isn't useful. It just seems like the kind of thing you use when you're deep into a research project or a reading jag, when you already have a good sense of what's available.

Browsing is a source of things you didn't know you wanted to know

I think this is completely true. I regret the closure of the one good used bookshop I had growing up, but would certainly have gotten a wider worldview from a big box store than the combination of it and the assortment of cramped mall stores I had availible. It's reducible to a function of shelf-space per store.

That said, the day Amazon started their personalized recommendations service, I ordered a hundred dollars of "I had no idea this even existed" must-haves.

I grew up in a rural area too. Does anyone remember the chain Coles? I had to special order Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey at the ridicules price of $12 for a non-trade paperback – it took four hours of babysitting to buy book. That was 1985. I tried to stick with the local library but it was just as bad… fifty copies of the latest Stephen King. I convinced my high school English teacher to give me a note to get access to Kutztown University’s Library. Philadelphia spoils me. There are two used stores, a regular retail and the University Bookstore within a few blocks of my apartment.

You can browse Amazon too - just use those weird lists that other customers make. It reminds me of those employee picks shelves at the video store.

Maybe it was all this talk about Amazon, but yesterday I spent my "lunch break", on a lark, researching teach-yourself-japanese books. Got so fired up I marched down to Cody's after work and bought a couple of the more highly recommended ones. And fine purchases they seem to be, one in particular is excellent and the chances of picking it out among the three or four shelves of books available at Cody's would have been slim at best.

Still, at Cody's I could do things like check whether a given book used romanji or the syllabaries and judge the user reviews for myself. There is one that looked good on Amazon that I haven't found yet, I'll check a few more stores tonight. If I do find it whether I buy it or not will mainly hinge on whether it seems to emphasize the syllabaries enough.

So, good feelings about bookstores aside, they each have their strengths for browsing and it's certainly ideal to use both. Considering that I find each useful, but that Amazon will not shut its doors any time soon, I prefer to give my money to the actual stores when it doesn't unduly inconvenience me.

I have done plenty of the kind of unstructured browsing, as discussed by Martha, on Amazon - all you have to do is put in very general search criteria, or follow the "recommended" leads mentioned by Ben (which are often not in themselves very interesting, but which can provide trails to interesting things). Actually I am beginning to find online retailers more useful for this kind of browsing than real stores, because there's no boundaries by shelving - I might start off on a history web-search and wind up accidentally looking at a book that would be categorized as 'science and nature' in a store, when it's less likely that I would have wandered over to that shelf in a physical environment.

all you have to do is put in very general search criteria

The problem is that sometimes this simply fails, where shelving succeeds. Take my problem finding foreign-language readers with footnoted glosses, for example:

In French, I've picked up Histoire d'une Revanche and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours by browsing shelves in used bookstores. In German, I've stumbled across Der Weg zum Lesen and Theological German: A Reader.

In all four cases, I was able to figure out that the book was a reader, and that it had accessible glosses on facing pages or footnotes, rather than crammed into a glossary at the end. Can you figure out an Amazon search that'll get me more books that match these criteria?

Can you figure out an Amazon search that'll get me more books that match these criteria?

I think in a case as specific as that you'd be better off starting in the opposite direction, by looking at publishing houses who do lines in readers.