Thrift stores here seem to be stuck in the 70’s and 80’s in the book section. Most are non-fiction diet and exercise of the day (‘Get Fit With Kathy’, ‘101 Recipes Using Your Microwave Oven’), some kids books, the inevitable John Grisham . Some thrift stores are run by religious types and I’m sure they throw out anything violent, horror-based, or god forbid sexxy. What’s left are dregs.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough. I was talking about the physical medium of books.
I am sure people will continue writing and reading for the foreseeable future. But I am now unsure if books as a form of media will be around in a few decades. I think it’s possible books might go the way of eight-tracks and laser discs.
I have a subscription to Hulu. I just checked their classic movie section. It offered a selection of seven movies, the oldest of which was made in 1985.
Amazon Prime’s entire catalog has about seven thousand movies. Netflix’s entire catalog has about four thousand movies. Every other streaming service has less than these two.
So, yes, the closing of video stores does mean there are a lot of movies you can’t watch at home anymore. Unless you own a copy on physical media.
We’re also heading into garage sale season. They want to make room for the things that will arrive in the weeks to come.
Thought this might be of interest for all the bibliophiles here:
The surreal part is how much more impressive it would be if the Chinese government wasn’t so intent on banning books.
“See, we do venerate free thought, really.”
Being in the business of selling books from a physical bookshop is a challenge. Many people read little and there are reasons some prefer digital books. There is competition from the web, often offering lower prices, much better selection, rarer items and quickish delivery. However, the success of some specific books is impressive. Many read during Covid. Books will be here as long as people are. Books are loved as items. Intelligent people love reading them, possibly showing them off (as Covid Zooms seemed to indicate). But selling books profitably is difficult.
The places in Canada that still sell physical books are either long established, loved and well run independent stores, or part of a single national chain focusing on newer stuff (due to demand and since the web prices are similar). Successful places also use space for selling coffee at attractive cafes, houseware, clothing and kitsch.
University towns do still have lots of booklovers and thriving charity shops selling lots of books for $3 or $5 which also mean independent stores have lower profits and more competition. From a readers perspective, good books are underappreciated and at few points in history have been so cheap, widely available or attractive.
My wife and I recently went to a local used bookstore with a large box of good condition, fairly recent sf paperbacks for trade credit. The owner wouldn’t take even one, saying nobody reads those authors.
This is also the season for library booksales. (If those aren’t universal, I need to explain that these rarely have culled books from the libraries. Instead they are donated to “Friends” organizations for fundraisers that support the library and do related programming. The city library system has a Friends and so do every suburban town library. We are members of several and do donate books ourselves when they can be torn from my hands.)
One had two long rows of tables of mysteries. One of the long rows was separated into authors. Five of them. Hundreds of books each.
The myth of used bookstores was that you might stroll in and browse the shelves and find anything, especially stuff you didn’t even know about. That’s neither economic or reasonable these days. A few authors absolutely dominate; all the others are clutter that make the shelves look falsely inviting. The internet can afford long tails, but b&m stores have to cater to customers within their physical limitations. Today that means children’s’ books, YA, some genre authors, and a handful of bestseller types. Nonfiction is forever shrinking, except celebrity biographies.
I’m sure that some larger stores in larger cities can sidestep this narrowness, but the trend is overwhelming.
My experience is very different. I’ve been to several used book stores and library sale in the past year. While there, indeed, big blocks of a few very well-selling authors (Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Janet Evanovich), they didn’t take up whole tables. There was quite a range of authors and topics. The library in the town where I work has an ongoing book sale (open two days a week in the building next door) that has quite a large range of authors, and even a well-stocked “Classics” section. There are lots of Clive Cusslers and Stephen Kings and the like, but they don’t even rate an entire shelf. Maybe the livbary culls these so that they don’t overwhelm.
The used book stores I’ve been to – although much, much fewer in number, are also extremely diverse without being dominated by five authors.
Mine neither. The Half Price Books in my town is not so hot, but used bookstores in Palo Alto (not downtown) and Mountain View have excellent selections. Another good one in San Jose became a bit pricey, but still had good stock.
I’ve stopped going to them but only because I decided I needed to work off my backlog before buying more old books, not because I was disappointed in the selection. And I found “The Doomsday Book” in a thrift store with a particularly good book collection.
I’ve been buying used books for 55 years. Ah for the days when you could buy '50s sf magazines for a quarter, but all in all the used book stores aren’t bad.
The problem is that there are fewer of them, by far. Boston and Cambridge used to be full of them, and each surrounding town seemed to have at least one. Now they’re mostly gone. There are three in Boston now, and the only one I know of in Cambridge is downstairs at the Harvard book Store. Many have closed in the last decade.
I’m glad that the Avenue Victor Hugo bookstore has re-opened. It used to be on Newbury Street in Boston, but is now in Lee, New Hampshire, 70 miles away from its original location (where it was when the SF magazine Galileo was edited there)
Amazingly, a new bookstore just opened near where I live, in Fremont, California. There hadn’t been a bookstore in this area since the Barnes & Noble closed, back in 2010. The new store is really small, but it’s real!
A hopeful sign in Boston is that, although the Barnes and Noble in the Prudential Center has closed (this is the first time since the center opened around 1970 that there has NOT been a bookstore there – and this B&N was the largest in Boston. Now there are only two non-used bookstores in the city not affiliated with a college or religion. And they’re both on Newbury St.), the Harvard Book Store has announced it’s opening up a store in the Pru. Probably at the same site. So the Pru will have a bookstore again! Yay!
This isn’t the same as the Harvard Co-Operative Society (the Coop) – The Harvard bookstore, which has long been in Harvard Square, is an independent store distinct from the Coop.
I’ve had good experiences with them. They’re basically a broker for used booksellers. Many of my beloved PG Wodehouse originals came through them, some from as far away as New Zealand.
I suppose the quality of the experience may vary with the individual bookseller, but I’ve yet to encounter a bad one.
Certainly just a few popular authors are featured at airport and grocery store booksellers, garage sales, charity shops mainly selling clothes and housewares, and in some smaller towns.
Some used book shops are run by people with large personal collections and eclectic interests. Many offer more selection, interesting reads and better value than big chain stores, which are nevertheless strongly worth supporting as well and are pleasant places to frequent. In my educated town, there are charity stores that only sell books - an innovation which should be more widespread imho.
The Raven book store is still open, they moved from JFK St. to Church St. Although, on our last visit, my girlfriend remarked that the selection “looks exactly like every undergrad’s bookshelf.”
Was this Rick’s on Monroe? He sells a lot of SF, both modern and classic, so I’d think he takes it in.
Bookends on Jefferson. I find more stuff there so it was more tempting.
I have to say the best part of used bookstores is (theoretically at least) the ability to trade in books I’ve already read to get ones I have not… except I re-read, so I can never bear to return 90+% of mine, so…
Which lead to my current reasons for buying a lot of kindle books. I have a house (which is not a given) and quite a few bookshelves…and they are overfull, quite literally double stacked in most places so I can’t even find some of my books at a glance because they’re hidden behind OTHER books.
So I buy far, far fewer new books of any sort, and 70-80% are ebooks.
But yes, I remember losing Waldenbooks, then Borders, and now B&N. There are a few boutique books stores in town with limited selection (and a strong emphasis on local / historical stuff to sell to tourists) and very few (but not zero) used bookstores that are always trying to unload excess copies of the last bestseller/fad but with a few gems remaining to be found.
Still, I can go to Denver and visit The Tattered Cover Book Store, so not all is lost (the main branch, the small ones are just too lacking in selection)
I rarely read fiction anymore and I haven’t been to a used book store in years but one of my last times in one is very clear in my mind.
It was 1998 and I was looking for a particular novel. I went to the independent book store near me (a fantastic store that still manages to thrive). They told me that they didn’t have it and it was out of print and they couldn’t get it.
The next day I went to the largest used book store in town and asked the owner about it. He knew the book but didn’t have it. He took my number and said that he would search around for me. He called me the next day and said that he found a paperback copy with a ripped cover and that I could have it for something like $25 (~$45 today). I said that that seemed like a bit much and he was a total ass to me about it and said effectively “good luck finding it anywhere and take it or leave it”.
Then I remembered that there was this online book seller called Amazon that everyone was talking about so I figured that I would give that a whirl. They had a brand new copy for $5. Done deal.
I called the used book guy back and told him exactly how easy it was to find and how much it cost.