[HillRat]

It's sad that, the more I live off my Kindle, the less serendipity I let into my reading life. There's something about the experience of a bookstore -- thumbing through a commentary on Origen in the Strand's basement and feeling the subway rattle the walls, finding a classic dime-store noir novel at Kayo, happening upon a first edition of Nabakov at McMurtry's Booked Up -- that gives you the sense of finding something secret, knowledge hidden away in the mouse-eaten pages of a volume buried deep in the stacks; books too rare, too obscure to ever make it to the clean and spacious realm of digitization. Now I'm mostly likely to just check out the daily and monthly deals in the Kindle store and never set foot in an actual store. I think I'm the poorer for it.

[ashleyblackmore]

What's stopping you from ditching the kindle and finding a bookstore?

[HillRat]

Part of it is no longer having eighty linear feet of ten-foot high bookcases anymore, part of it is just that the Kindle is so damned convenient for most books, and Safari only slightly less so. (And it's not as if I don't visit bookstore at all -- I walked out of a used bookstore the other day with a monograph on NLP and a copy of The Grand Strategy of Phillip II, both of which were serendipitous finds.)

But there's definitely a crowding-out effect with e-books, or even Amazon's many books for a penny (plus S&H). With Amazon, I no longer have to search widely for a particular book or topic, but that also means I'm not going to randomly wander through other sections and suddenly discover buried gold. In a certain sense, I have more information about a narrow segment of the market -- the specific book I'm looking for -- but less information about the market in general.

[DanBC]

One Story used to be good for discovering different authors. It's no where near what you're describing, but it's a start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Story

I still buy a bunch of non-fiction by looking through charity shops (UK version of thrift stores, maybe).