from the OP: "2014 was the best year we've ever had". Serendipity yes can be found online - no recommendations I've seen have ever approached Amazon's (once I fed my data into them), especially a quickly-shuttered (too creepy?) and now not-remembered program that harvested recommendations via pairing you with folks who'd rated/owned/purchased similar things. That said, it was mostly the experience of physicality that I was referring to, although there is something distinct about browsing physical shelves, a hard-to-capture mix of weight, quality, and visual-imprint – spine design and relative length of titles being nearly invisible online; anecdotally one can see reports of authors captive to Amazon's self-publishing ecosystem writing shorter and shorter books in order to capitalize on per/title payments from their Prime lending program.