Used bookstores are a lot like gardens -- they must be tended daily and grown in 100 ways, year after year. The city I grew up in was legendary for used bookstores, and they sit all but empty now, decades later. The 'modern' people chiming in about how to "search faster" are missing an aspect of the experience that is literal and measureable, as well as partially undefineable simply because the portion of the mind and senses that is exercised is non-linear -- file that under "non-linear thinking"
I have a Powells bookstore bookbag, and know others that do, too. Bookstores were a destination across counties or states. The loss of these local bookstores has 1000 unintended consequences. People see the absence the same way they see the absence of a blooming meadow where there is now only pavement and some litter -- in other words, not at all.
I am literally disheartened by the loss of local bookstores, in any size town.
For me, the most magical thing about the small local bookstores is the people working there.
Just getting into one, chatting with people genuinely and deeply passionate about what it is that they are selling. Having a coffee, talking about a book I read, what aspects I liked, philosophizing about the topic in general and getting recommendations what to read next based on that has beaten at least 10x any 'modern' and automatized approach I have ever seen.
But I think that is a situation where a lot of small shops, whether they sell books, music instruments, clothes, food, etc. are in. If they grow too big, the immense value of personal advice and interaction gets lost and if they are too small the people might not be able to make a living.
Growing up, my hometown wasn't big enough for a dedicated bookstore (~1400 residents), but there was a small gift shop on Main Street. It had lots of little knicknacks and other things associated with giving gifts. Past the cards and stationary, the boxes of chocolate, the little porcelain figurines, the bags of potpourri and scented candles, all the way at the back, were a couple small bookshelves. Mostly books for young children, or large format books you'd set on your coffee table with nice pictures in them.
What I remember most fondly was that even though the in-store selection was meager, if you were looking for a particular title, the owner was happy to look it up and order from her wholesale catalog. And she'd take 10% off the MSRP! Me and my other teenage nerd friends became some of her most regular customers, coming in to order sci-fi books.
Are you suggesting online posting is the same as an in-person conversation in a somewhat intimate environment? I get that it might be the same for you but surely you can appreciate that for most people online discussions are about as personal as a trip to the dmv.
Yep. My little town still has a bookstore downtown that’s been there for years. Run by a retired English teacher who seems to know everything about every book in the store.
I believe they ended up working a supplier deal with some of the local schools that helps with consistent revenue.
Ever since the pandemic started I’ve gone there so much that we’re on a first name basis. :)
This aspect still exits in some areas. Local bike stores are still running and have the same community feel. They are perhaps only around today because people who ride bikes a lot tend to not be the people who want to drive 20km to the nearest mega store.
Why are people creating a community at the local bike shop? I ride my bike to work everyday (or did). But I only went to the local bike shop to purchase a new bike about every five years and went in for parts a few times a year. What in the world are people doing that they are going there so frequently that a community can be built up?
Its probably not quite as good as what is being described with the book shop but if you ride frequently and especially on rough mtb trails then you will probably end up going to the store once a month for replacement parts / services / clothes / new gadgets. And while you are there its common to have a chat about whats going on / new developments in public trails / etc.
Perhaps that is somewhat of a romanticised view or may have been different in your country. I usually found that 2nd hand bookstore staff are usually the cheapest labour they could find, and hardly knew the real worth of most of the stuff they were selling.
I romanticised by implying that all the stores are like that.
My experience is mostly from Switzerland where I grew up and Colombia where I have been living the last 5 years.
In Switzerland pure 2nd hand, non antique shops in general are somewhat rare. It is usually sold directly online or in places run by charities. I think 2nd hand had a bit of a resurgence with the raise of the hipster subculture, but don't know the current state. The ones I went to had a mix between used and new or only new.
In Colombia you get a bigger range from the big, cheap labor second hand book stores as you describe, to the small super personal ones. Here is also where for the first time I have seen coffee service and a few tables/sofas within a bookstore. Never back home.
So yes, true, not every small bookshop you walk into will be like that, but so far in every city I have stayed a couple weeks in in Europe and LatAm, I found at least one.
On the other hand, I can get any book I want, including long out-of-print books. I remember years looking for a copy of Clarke's "The Deep Range". Now getting a copy is as trivial as pushing a button.
And I have indulged myself, acquiring a small mountain of books :-)
I also browse the books at thrift stores. It's how I've obtained a ton of strange books I never would have discovered otherwise. For example, I found an encyclopedia of electronic circuits I never knew existed. Goodwill is a book gold mine, I wound up getting a nearly complete set of the Star Trek novels (and cheap as dirt, too!).
I think part of OPs point is that you think you can get a copy of any book. I don't mean to sound snarky at all; it's just that you know what you see online now, which is not all that is offline. You don't miss what you don't know.
My experience is of numerous out of print books that might have had small publishers in small editions. Even an unusual edition of an well known book can be unique in various valuable ways.
One year the university I was at was in danger of flooding. The priority was moving books that as far as they could determine were the only remaining copies of. You wouldn't believe the numbers of them that were moved. Many used bookstores I've visited were similar, with books selected because they were unusual.
> Even an unusual edition of an well known book can be unique in various valuable ways.
Absolutely! I had a paperback copy of Dune when I was younger, that disappeared after being loaned to someone. It was printed on very fine grained paper (think bible paper), maybe ~2cm thick, despite being 700+ pages long, and the fine grain of the paper made the text very crisp. Modern paperback copies are 4.9cm thick, and the text isn't as crisp. The only way I'll ever find a replacement for the higher quality paperback copy is to find an old one at a used bookstore sometime. This doesn't make it valuable in a monetary sense, but it still matters to me.
To add to your point, I recently tried to pick up some of my favorite movies from when I was younger, only to find that they were “out of print”. Some of these may not be lost to people searching around online because the directors are well known, but you’d likely have to search first.
Inland Empire - David Lynch /
The Dreamers - Bernardo Bertolucci /
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Sam Peckinpaw /
La Luna - Bernardo Bertolucci /
(I’m sure there are many more, these are just a few that I’ve hunt down on eBay this year)
The last two on this list, I watched because I made friends with a video rental store manager, who loved to recommend movies for me. The store itself often did not have things he thought I should watch so he would bring them from home and lone them to me personally. I really miss that sort of thing.
I do have a good used bookstore nearby though, and the last personal recommendation I received led to me reading every George Saunders book.
Every one of those titles showed up on torrent sites via the in-browser search feature, and a total of two clicks (magnet link, confirmation in torrent app) would've had the movie viewable on my laptop within, at most, a few minutes of downloading.
Ethics of torrenting aside, I can't think of a faster way to get the results you want.
For books, again, ethics aside, usually Library Genesis is equally fast.
Yes a friend of mine said exactly the same thing and sent me a torrented copy of The Dreamers. I looked awful. So bad I ordered the dvd. Which had some of its own issues with quality I’ll admit, but at least it wasn’t full of digital compression artifacts. I know not everything is like this but my experience with torrents has yielded a lot of varying quality problems. And these movies are not very esoteric they are made by much lauded directors. The fact that they are out of print means there is no higher quality rip to speak of. It’s why I’m particularly am a big fan of Criterion because they do do this work (such as a 4K restoration of Ran, beautiful!). That work requires money. It will take happen often we disregard these issues because we can get something close faster for free.
With books of course this is mostly a non issue so I’ll give you that (aside from good and bad translations or edits. Dostoevsky is a good example. I believe Wallace once asked what does it mean “to fly at” and why would you translate the Russian to somethings so unreasonable.)
However the overall point was that I made a real flesh and blood friend in a physical place which is how I came to know these things to begin with. And otherwise have never heard certain movies ever mentioned and wouldn’t know about them at all.
It’s not even just books that don’t exist online... it’s books that you never hear of because you don’t bump into them in a bookstore. The books you learn about online are selected by mechanisms very different to those that you learn about in a used bookstore.
True, but I often find books by looking at cites to them in other books I have.
I found one really cool book that was simply pages and pages of schematics for vacuum tube radios and TVs. It was intended for repair shops. I ran across it as it was a prop used as part of staging a house that was for sale. I didn't buy the house :-) but I did note down the title/author, went online, and found/bought my own copy. The real estate agent showing the house thought I was very weird.
I think Goodwill's selection depends on it's area. Their book selection at the stores where I live aren't that good. The prices of books vary between stores. But you can count on one thing: Each store will always have at least one complete set of Twilight novels.
Getting a book like that is possible, but for me a huge chunk of the value of my collection is the journey to getting it. Finding it randomly in a tiny bookshop while on a trip is way more memorable than buying it on amazon. It’s the same with buying records for me. Sure I could buy most of the long out of print records I’d want to own... but the search is most of the fun.
If you're talking about piracy, do you only read books from dead authors? Or do you pay them via alternate channels? Or are you just fine with enjoying their content without paying them back a cent?
The cost of lending and reselling a book is explicitly part of the initial remuneration.
Books deteriorate, and a normal book can only be lent or resold so often. A paperback read by one reader is usually in a good condition (but obviously 'read'), a paperback read by twenty readers (who took it along on travels, dropped it, put it on dirty surfaces, etc.) will be near the end of its life. Hard-cover library books can take more of a beating, but are read by more people and get damaged nonetheless. The average lifespan of a popular library book is short.
If books didn't deteriorate authors and publishers wouldn't make any money from second-hand or library books, but as it is, they do. Any time you read a book, it gets closer to being taken out of circulation. Any time you purchase a book and keep it, you take it out of circulation for years, decades even. That all drives the need for new editions of that book. This is no different from second-hand cars or bicycles.
> The 'modern' people chiming in about how to "search faster" are missing an aspect of the experience that is literal and measureable, as well as partially undefineable simply because the portion of the mind and senses that is exercised is non-linear -- file that under "non-linear thinking"
I don't understand the luddite attitude towards ebooks:
- you can carry them anywhere
- you can search them (more important for technical books)
- you can save important parts as screenshots in some other folder
- they can be significantly more affordable
- even those people in small cities can get them without searching in bookstores
- Poor/middle-class students can easily get pirated copies
- you can copy paste from them.
The resistance to ebooks instead of adaptation is weird.
In fact, because of ubiquity of smartphones, I wish there would be some sort of programming environments for these devices, that nicely reformat code to fit into the smartphone screens or even use some different representation, so that we can get something done on the go. These devices are not just for consuming Netflix content.
A few times I've gone to Portland specifically for the food and for Powells. It's easy for me to lose a weekend browsing and skimming -- and when you need a little rest, there are plenty of areas to hang out and chat with whoever you went with.
It's unfortunate that this is such a rare feature for a city.
That's what growing old looks like, friend. The world we knew is going away, to be replaced by a new world for new people who care about different things.
I'm sure people who genuinely loved tending to mules and horses "lost interest" when regular folks started using trains and cars to travel. It's just how it is - humanity goes forth, as it will.
But that is only partially true. People socialize a lot less than they used to, things changed in a fundamental way. If you look around in NYC 50% of storefronts are empty and unoccupied. There are multiple reasons for the latter but it still is a fundamental change. Maybe the virtual world is thriving in some hot pockets but the analog world is becoming less welcoming to many of us.
You live in a small rural community. Industrial revolution happens, and slowly most people move to cities. If you stay in the little town, you feel lonely, "people don't visit anymore". If you move to the city and try to live by the old rules of rural community, you'll be upset: "people on the street don't say hello and good morning anymore, they don't socialize!". But they do - just by different rules, across different groups from before.
We are going through an industrial change on a level last seen 100 years ago at best (electricity, cars, factories). Life is changing accordingly.
I don't know if people socialize less, but they socialize differently. I see plenty of people riding buses, trains, or walking around and endlessly messaging someone on their phones. It's easy to find complaints mocking these people as being drones and slaves to their phones, but they're actively socializing everywhere they go. They're just doing it with someone you can't see.
Most people 30 years ago weren't chatting up everyone on the bus during their daily commute. They were merely tolerating people. People today are silently talking the whole ride these days.
Yeah, it's harder to sit down and have dinner with friends and family every week than it used to be, but it's easier than ever to talk to them all day if you want to.
I know my grandparents would have people over for dinner almost daily, but they never left their small town. They knew those people their whole life and never lived more than 20 minutes away. Seeing them was easy, but if those people couldn't visit for dinner, that was it. There was no talking to anyone else for days if nobody randomly dropped by. Now people often move hundreds or thousands of miles from home, yet it's possible to have a conversation all hours of the day if you want to.
It used to take about three generations before everything you love fades from public memory. Now it's less than one.
Soon Warhol's adage will be proven right: 15 minutes will be the lifespan of not just fame, but of all shared memory.
Soon thereafter, all individual memories will last just 15 minutes. Then long term memory will no longer exist.
It's also reasonable to point out that this is perhaps a trap lots of people growing old fall into, and also perhaps not the most healthy thing to do.
It might be better to adapt rather than pine, if that's possible.
I could pine for the days of my favorite rock bands not being considered 'classic rock'. I could also try and enjoy new music that isn't strictly 'classic rock'.
It relies on more assumptions than just that. It relies on the assumption that naturalism and materialism are true, and hence an afterlife is very unlikely (if not impossible).
You can reject naturalism and materialism without agreeing that God exists. Consider the late 19th / early 20th century British idealist philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (who at Cambridge acted as the mentor of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore) – McTaggart insisted that God did not exist, that he knew God did not exist, that God's existence was impossible – but he also claimed that time and matter are illusions, and the true reality is timeless immortal souls and their eternal love for one another.
Conversely, it is possible to believe in God without an afterlife. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus denied an afterlife, but he did not deny the Gods of ancient Greek polytheism. (Probably, if he had lived in a more monotheistic culture, he would have dropped the plural.)
The ancient Jewish Sadducees, who controlled the office of High Priest up until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, they rejected the Pharisees' belief in resurrection of the dead. (The Pharisees are the historical progenitors of contemporary Judaism; and, while Christianity conflicted with the Pharisees a lot, witness how much they are criticised in the Gospels, one can't deny that Christianity took a lot from them, including the belief in a future resurrection of the dead). It isn't entirely clear what exactly the Sadducees believed about the afterlife, but certainly by some accounts they believed that death was extinction. (Part of it depends on whether they understood "Sheol", the grave, to simply be a symbol for extinction, or an actual place where the dead are conscious.)
When I visited the Pacific North-West in 2015 (I herald from Italy), I made a point of visiting Powell’s Bookstore in Portland (OR) and even chose my hotel (which turned out to be the very hip Ace Hotel) based on proximity to it.
I pointedly decided to buy second-hand copies of several of my favourite books (The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake and Surfaces & Essences by Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander) from them, despite the absurd logistical hassle of buying them and transcontinentally shipping them home because I wanted storied copies with no pristine air to them.
I have a Powells bookstore bookbag, and know others that do, too. Bookstores were a destination across counties or states. The loss of these local bookstores has 1000 unintended consequences. People see the absence the same way they see the absence of a blooming meadow where there is now only pavement and some litter -- in other words, not at all.
I am literally disheartened by the loss of local bookstores, in any size town.