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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

"""Eight months out of the year he runs a gas fireplace near the front of his store. He’s got an old leather reading chair near it, where he sits next to piles of books and a long wood end table which acts as his checkout counter."""

When I grow up ...

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"If you have a library and a garden, you have all you need" Cicero

Fantastic, right? Also, your HN username seems to fit very well with the story and your comment!

When I retire.

Back in the Before Times (Before Amazon), owning a bookstore was something I considered when I retire. Now that retirement is actually near, sadly, I have to let this go. There's simply no future in it anymore.

You just have to do a better job serving people in your community than Amazon does.

https://www.bookweb.org/for-the-record

Bookstores in tourist places seem to do well (otherwise why is there always a bookstore in tourist towns?!). I think people are looking for something to pass the time while sitting in their hotel or gifts to bring home, and they probably aren't going to get Amazon deliveries on vacation.

> Bookstores in tourist places seem to do well (otherwise why is there always a bookstore in tourist towns?!).

Are you sure they do well? Sales might have severely dropped, though those shops might still be coasting off old stock (think about the well-stocked bookshops in the tourist ghettos of Nepal or India: so much of what they are selling was accumulated in the 1990s, and they are still trying to sell it).

Along the same lines, I am traveling at the moment and just recently was chatting with another backpacker about the declining amount of used books for tourists to take in hostels and guesthouses. When a decade ago one might have seen multiple shelves of books for exchange, that phenomenon is disappearing. The fact that most people read on their phones these days, and the other passionate readers are likely to own Kindles, is likely the cause of this.

I wouldn't be so sure. Have you ever been to Powell's in Portland?[0] They seem to consistently liberate me from more cash in one visit than Amazon does in a year.

[0] https://www.powells.com/

Powells, in Portland, like The Tattered Cover, in Denver, are multimillion dollar, well established and well loved institutions. I've been to both and absolutely love them, but no newbie could ever attempt to duplicate their success.

Perhaps Portland is already taken, but I'm sure there are other cities where another parent and child [0] could open a bookstore in a warehouse in a rough part of town that ~50 years later becomes a beloved institution. And make no mistake, the impressive main location was NOT in a nice part of town only 20 years ago. That used to be a part of downtown you wanted to avoid after dark.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_Books#20th_century

Yes but Powell's is one of the best bookstores in the world. It's a huge operation in a well-known populated city, not a small one-man thing.

Underneath Waterloo bridge on London's South Bank is a a regular second hand book store. It has more traffic than God but seems to never sell anything (it always seems a bit like a tatty Airport bookshop selling stock from three years ago.)

But the location - oh man. You could do so much with that pitch - coffee, lounging areas, right next to a dozen restaurants. It's almost a crime it's not properly done.

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