[s5ma6n]

I would confirm this as a resident of the aforementioned city.

The specialist (or even many generalist) bookstores usually follow a certain ideology and sell books heavily aligned with those views. Unfortunately, this slowly converts those stores to echo chambers as the objectiveness of the stores slowly fade away.

[blip54321]

Only sometimes

I used to live near an excellent technical book store which carried things like O'Reilly books. It went under as the Internet progressed. Many countries have such things like math book stores, or stores specializing in philosophy and similar humanities.

Specialized book stores have a long, reputable history, and the echo chamber style specialization is a pretty recent phenomenon.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.