I’m probably that one weirdo who doesn’t actually miss bookstores. I mean I liked bookstores plenty, when that was how you bought books. There was something cool in looking around and seeing what was there.
But Amazon is kind of like that, except that they have ALL the books. None of this going to two or three bookstores hoping they have a copy of what you’re looking for, only to find it at the third place and only in hardback for twice what you wanted to pay. And searching/browsing is better - if I find a book on something, it’s easy enough to see what else is suggested and go down that rabbit hole. Or I can click on the author and find all of their works. And I have a Kindle, so I’ve got all the fun of being able to easily annotate and search/browse those annotations. Lots better than using a highlighter, writing in the margins or sticking little bookmarks in a book, IMO.
So as a result, actually going to a bookstore is kind of a pain now. Granted, I can’t leaf through books on Amazon, but I feel like the rest of the benefits make up for it.
That’s the difference between collecting and reading. When I went to used bookstores, a lot of it was the thrill of the chase, finding a few magazines that I didn’t have. I’m sure I could fill in the few holes in my collection from Amazon or Ebay by throwing money at it, but what’s the fun of that?
Kind of like baseball cards. When I was a kid you collected cards by buying the packages of them, with the horrible gum. Getting a card you didn’t have was exciting. Now you can buy gigantic boxes of them. Good for Topps, I assume, but how boring to collect cards that way.
I will agree with you in part – I have been able to fill in many of the gaps in my Jules Verne collections by buying modern reprints or obscure old used copies through Amazon that I would never find in the bookstores – I know this to be true, because I’ve been looking for these books in bookstores for decades. So I have a nearly complete set now. (not really complete, though. Even Amazon and Abe Books haven’t been able to turn up a copy of The Sea Serpent – and nobody’s reprinted it).
On the other hand, I have found many of the ones I need by scouring used bookstores – that’s bump’s "thrill of the chase thing. So I have Magellanica and Captain Antifer and Dr. Ox and several others via used bookstores.
But even with their suggestions and previews, I never find all the interesting books through Amazon or Kindle sites that I do actually browsing through bookstores. That was the only way I found the three books that came out this year about Medusa. I never would have stumbled upon them using Amazon or Kindle. I know, again, because they didn’t show up, despite my looking for books omn gorgons.
LA was a mecca for used bookstores, way too many to list. I think just about all of them are gone now. We used to make annual pilgrimages to Acres of Books in Long Beach, one of the world’s largest used book stores. I never found all that much there and much preferred the comic book shop across the street.
My favorite bookstore was Other Times in West LA whose owner could seemingly chat about any topic, whose stock never ceased to amaze with obscurities I knew not existed and whose prices remained reasonable to the end.
Another productive book source was the annual Westchester Rotary Club Book Sale. I found many treasures there over the years - including a $1 copy of Seduction of the Innocent and my introduction to Don Blanding, An Artist Turned ‘Vagabond’ Poet | 5th Color - all ridiculously low-priced. I will always carry the memories of leaving that place with my arms full and my neck sore.
My sister doesn’t want me to go there any more. I did find an old leather bound Teddy Roosevelt book at that sale.
I loved getting books as gifts when I was a kid. Much better than socks and underwear! Once I had money of my own I bought books wherever I found them. As you said, @Dropo, L.A. has/had a ton of book stores. I remember the West LA Used bookstore around the corner from the Nuart. I loved that place. Once, when I was on my strong Arthur Machen kick, I went there specifically looking for an old book containing The Great God Pan and two other stories. I walked in, and there in the “new” section was that book. The owner had just returned from the UK a week before…with that book.
Speaking of Machen, in the days before the internet, Sherry Gottlieb, owner of the late lamented A Change of Hobbit, would do searches for me. I bought several Machens that she got for me.
There was also a cool mystery book store on State Street called Cloak and Dagger. Now gone.
Mostly now I get books from Amazon, but a lot of older ones I get from “independent” book sellers who sell through Amazon. Didn’t Amazon buy Abebooks? If it did, it’s weird, because I always find more options on Abebooks than on Amazon itself.
I collect 20th century American humor. Nobody else does that I’ve ever heard of. (Well, there’s the Miller Collection of Wit and Humor at Brown, but I don’t know if that is really similar.) No lists exist. No standard references. A few names are well enough known to rate Wikipedia articles with bibliographies, but the vast majority are ephemeral.
The only way to find old humor books is to find a used book store with a humor section. That’s it. I’ve discovered hundreds of titles I’ve never heard of before or since just by combing shelves. Now that that’s impossible I’m shutting it down.
I’m sure other collectors of odd subjects feel the same way. I use Amazon regularly. I go to bookfinder.com (a metasearch engine that goes through all the major book sources) all the time. I depend on ebay because it has pictures of the books it sells, which abebooks and biblio normally don’t. None of them will give me what I don’t know exists. Bookstores will and do.
I’m not a collector though; I’m a reader. So the whole “thrill of the chase” thing is absent for me. I don’t much care about what edition of a book I have, or whether it’s paper or digital, etc…
I guess what I’m saying is that from my perspective, we’re not missing much with the decline of bookstores- we have a better alternative now. Amazon has a more complete catalog, it’s easier to find what you’re looking for, you can almost always get used or new books for whatever particular book it is that you are looking for, and so forth. I hold no romantic notions abut bookstores- they were great when that was all we had, but we’ve got something better now.
My argument is that I don’t consider what we have now altogether a “better alternative”. I like being able to get the books I want when I know what they are. But online bookstores are not a good way of showing me what is available out there. The methods of throwing titles in my path that the websites think I’ll be interested in do not have enough randomness or variation to acquaint me with books that are outside of my usual interest, or even more obscure books within my realm of interest. As I say above, I found two of the three books on Medusa this summer by seeing them in bookstores (and the third one from friends who saw it, not via any website). I bought my Verne books this summer online, but all the others were bought as hard copies in bookstores, and especially used bookstores.
To me “the thrill of the chase” at used book stores is trying to find books I don’t have by an author (particular one I’ve recently discovered and liked, so now I’m trying to read everything they’ve ever written) or looking for older books that had been recommended but aren’t readily available at new book stores.
Amazon and other online stores have made some of this easier, and it’s nice now that when older or out-of-print books are reissued as ebooks.
I would agree this is a downside of getting everything off Amazon/Kindle. I generally only find out about different things reading about them elsewhere on the internet. For example the Everest thread reminded me to download a sample of Into Thin Air. And this is where I heard about Into the Wild, come to think of it. Because I don’t normally read books like that, I have to go off the beaten path on the internet and podcasts to learn about books outside my primary genres. But I do manage to do that. I’ve got more books to read than I could ever hope to in a lifetime.
I understand. My wife is a reader, not a collector. I am also for things like most non-fiction, where if I have a copy I’ve read I’m happy to donate it. But what stores have goes beyond the algorithms, which never really work for me. For instance, Robert Silverberg taked about a French space opera from 1854 called Star. I discovered I owned it (the DAW cover made it look like fantasy, so it was not high on my reading list.) It goes for non-books also. In a high-end mall in Santa Clara we found a game from a behavioral economist who my daughter worked with. We got it for her for Christmas. She’d never heard of it, so it was a great gift. No algorithm would ever recommend that.
I buy her a pre-WW II Marketing book every year, and searching on Biblio works well for that, since very few bookstores I frequent would have anything reasonable in that area. But seeing something on Amazon does not give the thrill of finding it in real life.
At the moment, it’s Barnes & Noble. I am still working my way through a bunch of gift cards my dad randomly handed me a ways back. It looks like I’ve got about two freebies and a discounted third left to go.