[Ollinson]

I'd rather have a corporate bookstore than an independent one. My personal experience with independent bookstores is that they're usually biased about their stock and can be even more vindictive against authors they don't like.

It doesn't help that most bookstore owners I have met (maybe half a dozen) are aggressively opinionated about what books are "worthy."

[eropple]

Is that a negative, when there's another one down the street? I like people with opinions, when there's more than one to sample from. That Amazon has effectively destroyed the idea of a bookstore as a curator, without really replacing it, is still troubling to me (and random curators online don't have the same investment--that is to say, a financial one--in providing something worth considering).