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Comment by pearle | Hacker News Reader

I'm really going to miss bookstores if they disappear, even the big chains like Barnes & Noble.

Can you expand on why?

I keep seeing people say that they'll miss bookstores, but I can't imagine what they'll miss.

Bookstores are very inefficient. Ordering books they don't have is a pain. You literally have to judge a book by its cover, or at least the 5 minutes you spend perusing it. Finding books in the shelves is difficult. A lot of people seem to think that Amazon is winning on price alone, but it's because they're offering a better product.

So I don't know why people keep saying they'll miss bookstores. The atmosphere? Isn't that replicated by coffee shops?

You can sit in them and read through books for hours if you choose to. And it's much quieter than coffee shops.

You find it easier to read a book based on what's available to you in a physical bookstore (the entire book) versus what's available on Amazon (a small sample if you're lucky and a bunch of reviews from people of unknown tastes)? That seems a bit odd to me.

I'm not sat there reading the book; I'll look at the table of contents, skim bits that I think might be useful, and then have to make a judgement call.

With Amazon, I get the TOC, I get reviews that tell me whether the book is any good or not (which is better than a gut reaction, for me at least), and if I really want to delve into what's in the book, Google Books usually does a good job of showing me some relevant pages.

I don't have time to read an entire book, nor peruse for 20 minutes. I think the people who are like that are the ones who want bookstores to stay, but those people are a very small minority.

It's actually hard to explain, the whole experience of going to the bookstore is valuable to me, looking at any page and feeling the book in my hands before buying it, having other books that don't really matter next to the ones I'm looking for is very interesting, it's a discovery thing.

Would you be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a month for that privilege? Their model is sustainable if they charge a heavy premium for the physical bookstore experience.

I tried spending an afternoon with my daughter in the children's section of Amazon, but she was bored as hell.

The reason I like bookstores and library stacks in a different way from internet searches and online purchases is that there is an element of serendipity that seems missing from the internet world, and also a calming appreciation for the idea that things take time. On the internet, most content is broken into tiny chunks; myriad sites vie for attention by dancing and flashing and trying to make me click and buy; most web pages are high noise, low signal; in filter/aggregator type sites, even the best of them, attention is mainly directed to the new and popular. By contrast, browsing a shelf of books about a subject I’m interested in – which is to say, pulling down books, leafing through, skimming the index for relevant keywords, reading chunks, picking a few to check out or buy – is about the highest signal/noise block of attention I can spend.

For me, digital systems have three big advantages over printed books. (1) I can access them anywhere, (2) searching and hopping between hyperlinks is much faster than paper citation tracking, (3) if I already know exactly what I’m looking for, it’s usually possible to find it quickly.

But quite often I don’t know what I’m looking for. Almost every time I walk into a good bookstore, I end up walking out with a book I’d never have thought to buy online. In those cases, searching faster or clicking more hyperlinks wouldn’t help me, and overall the time spent online would have been more usefully spent actually reading.

I don't know... there is still a B&N store here and if I judge them by their selection of tech books, they are pretty poor. Worse than the now-gone Borders, which was worse than the local indy store they forced out of business back in the 1990s. Can't say I'd miss them if they closed. The people who work there seem to have followed the same trend as the books.

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