[AStonesThrow]

Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

Lately if I really must put hands on dead trees, the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.

Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller. Goodness gracious.

[jacobgkau]

> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged

Fiction books don't really become "outdated" to the point of being useless. That's only an argument for encyclopedias/technical manuals/etc.

> the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.

I'm sure the same could be said about furniture, but I'd expect more luck finding interesting/quality second-hand furniture at a used furniture store than I would from a general dumping ground of miscellaneous used items.

For that matter, since you're asking about all brick-and-mortar book shops, I'd also expect better new furniture from a brick-and-mortar furniture shop than from a thrift shop. And while books may not require seeing them in person as much to know what they are, the act of discovering them for fun based on what happens to be there is (possibly) easier to understand than discovering a particular piece of furniture.

[AStonesThrow]

Okay, well, the article in the OP describes a situation in Great Britain, and I'm unsure how accurately it describes the bookshop industry in the United States.

Here's what I've seen: Amazon.com came online as a bookseller, chiefly, and began to eat the lunch of every brick-and-mortar. Then in turn, independent sellers began shopping in those stores in order to snap up inventory and sell it in their cottage-industry online shops. My cousin noted, back around 2010, that many antique, thrifts, and secondhand stores were clogged not with consumers, but shoppers and arbitrators and pickers, just scavenging for anything they could sell.

Between 2016-2019 I was in ministry with a small "lending library" at church. We had two bookshelves full of books that parishioners might enjoy reading. We had just lost our entire inventory when I started, and so it was up to me to sift through donations, especially estates of the deceased, to build up the collection again. I destroyed a lot of bad titles in those days. I noticed that there wasn't a lot of demand to borrow, nor theft, except for the non-book media such as DVDs. There was someone interested in messing up all my organizational work, though. I began to realize there was no good way to recycle or donate the unwanted titles, and eventually I was sort of forced out when a deluge of Spanish-language books came in, and I couldn't keep up with the evaluations and the shelves were full anyway.

I've also hung out in libraries for a long time. Now if you have visited libraries over the last 5 decades, you've noticed dwindling shelf-space for physical books, as computer labs and other tech takes over. It's plain to see in action: nobody really wants to check out books on such a scale as in the 1980s. eBooks are hot properties, along with CDs, DVDs and video games, oh man the shelf space given over to electronic media now! Ask any librarian and they will tell you about the proportionate need for space in this regard.

Furthermore, there's this quiet revolution in "libraries" known as "Little Free Library". My municipality and many others sponsor and encourage them. They're essentially little residential kiosks where any passerby can take a book or leave a book. Essentially many become dumping grounds for unwanted titles and real junk, I suppose, but perhaps have some utility for bookworm types who stroll through neighborhoods, walking dogs, jogging, and hob-nobbing with suburban neighbors. Many cafés also have such library shelves for customer sharing. Books are often useful for very small children to have and pass down.

Going to college in 2017-2023, I noticed a lot of classes where students carried no books, no notebook, and not even a backpack! They'd bring in their phone to class! The eBook could easily be accessed online from an app, so why carry those hella-heavy books around? Many students in I.T., coding, and other tech subjects would have negative use for dead-trees and we regarded them as pure anathema, because it was all about the online access to edu materials. Books and the bookstore did exist, and there were mandatory titles in many disciplines, but always had eBook counterparts. (And yes, I saw The Half-Blood Prince and I understand the value of a well-loved secondhand text!)

Lastly I managed to divest my home of every single book I own, save for a few personal titles and a Bible or two. I found that I never sit down and read a book except in power-outages or trying to drift-off to sleep. Books are too heavy to carry on the bus, and impractical to store on a shelf when I'm not home. Every resource is vastly more useful when loaded into cloud storage for me. I've been unsuccessful in eliminating paper, and I still use a printer, and I still receive paper email in the USPS, but as for books, they're history.

So all this above stuff makes me shake my head at this OP. When I hung out in the libraries I read some classic fiction and got some good learning, but the library situation itself is pointing to a book-free future IMHO. I've known some great bookshops in my day, and cats to go with them, and they were anchors in the community for people to just chill and sit around, but I still regard them as Apatosaurs in this digital age.

[jacobgkau]

Ok? I'm in the United States too, and my girlfriend actively uses several of those "Little Free Library" stands around where we live (in addition to our actual local library). I personally haven't gone out of my way to "divest my home of every single book I own" as you "managed" to do.

It just seems like you're writing off an entire industry because you personally don't like paper books anymore (and have made that part of your identity). There's nothing wrong with you living like that, but it's not quite enough evidence to make statements like "no reason to waste real estate." The market will decide that (and in the case of Britain, it sounds like it's deciding more space is warranted rather than less, with different types of business models being the main question).

(By the way, your quirky use of the phrase "paper email" doesn't make much sense, either. I know you're trying to give off the air that you think paper mail is obsolete, but you might as well just call it "paper mail" and shorten your preferred medium of email to just "mail" if you want to do that. Otherwise, you're making the names of things unnecessarily long in perpetuity-- not so practical.)

[AStonesThrow]

> paper email

The USPS has this service called "Informed Delivery" where they scan the front-side of every mailpiece and send it to my email and a dashboard on their website. So every service day, they literally email me images of what my physical postal mailbox will receive later in the day. It's not farfetched. The USPS has been running electronic scanning for internal purposes for decades, and they have perfected OCR for address recognition and routing. It's rather amazing how they tooled up for this, and adapted to all the crazy ways that humans can send paper through the mail. But just about everybody that works for the Post Office is a space-alien:

https://youtu.be/lr7pyggTmmY?si=g8PN_ajCo9I281-5

It's not simply me disliking books. It's the entire world and the industries that are drying up. Look around you! Newspapers going out of business, or transitioning to online models. They simply can't distribute paper newspapers so widely anymore. Nobody likes to carry them around, the newsprint is wasteful, the logistics are byzantine, and so many people can just instantly visit websites (and print stuff if they want) why keep printing, printing, printing?

Amazon, as I mentioned, began as a bookseller, and now they're actually printing stuff on demand as a publisher. In fact, many publishers are printing titles on demand, rather than stockpiling them in a huge warehouse (wasting real estate and overhead costs.) Many, many customers have openly complained, bewailing the poor standards and shoddy print quality they receive from these POD services, because books used to be artistic masterpieces, an occasion for celebrating the pinnacle of design and artisan craftsmanship; feeling a book in my hand and smelling it, and looking upon the cover art: truly an emotional, spiritual experience. But it's in decline, and you can't deny that.

Yes, it's a very slow decline. Yes, there's still space for dead-tree books and big storefronts to cram them on shelves, because even those brick-and-mortar locations can sell online to eBay or Amazon customers halfway around the world. But it's in decline.

All of this same stuff happened to vinyl records. I grew up with Mom's 78RPM turntable and listened to Bing Crosby on it. We had fun playing 33.333 RPM and even 16RPM on the Heathkit stereo system that Dad assembled himself. I spent TONS of Grandma's money on vinyl records, imports, 12" singles, cassettes, audio CDs, boxed sets, coloured vinyl, picture discs, flexi discs stapled into magazines: you name it, I purchased it, I wore out the needle on it, it all got stolen and sold to the secondhand record dealers.

Now you can still find vinyl records in big cardboard sleeves with marvelous art and you can still purchase a direct-drive turntable with a diamond needle and you can play all those vinyls on your analog tube amplifier with Monster Cable oxygen-free leads and Cerwin-Vega 3-way speakers with a subwoofer and Dolby sound. But nobody who's really a music lover cares about vinyl; you're just a vinyl lover and a nostalgia freak and a misfit who pines for the bygone days. Nobody even buys or makes many CDs/DVDs anymore since we got legal digital distribution.

That's the same way that books will go. It'll be a long time, indeed, but eventually the market will squeeze out paper books and you simply won't find the titles you need on paper. Those college bookshops will reclaim their very valuable shelf-space for graphing calculators, ear-buds, and chocolate bars. The printing presses will be unrepairable; some will go to museums and most will go to the metal scrap-heap forever. Xerox and Canon will continue servicing office copiers but paper itself may become scarce. Who knows.

[jacobgkau]

> The USPS has this service called "Informed Delivery" where they scan the front-side of every mailpiece and send it to my email and a dashboard on their website. So every service day, they literally email me images of what my physical postal mailbox will receive later in the day. It's not farfetched. The USPS has been running electronic scanning for internal purposes for decades, and they have perfected OCR for address recognition and routing.

Yeah, that's electronic real mail, not paper email. It's irrelevant to the term you attempted to use. "Paper email" would be printing out an email and sending it on paper instead, which is not what you were referring to (which is why it didn't make sense as a term to use).

You said "I still receive paper email in the USPS." The USPS is not printing out emails and delivering them to you on paper. Therefore, that statement was incorrect (nonsensical).

[bigstrat2003]

> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

Not really. Plenty of people still read, and they still read hard copies of books. I don't think you will get argument that business isn't as good as it used to be, but that's a long way away from not being viable at all.

> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

You haven't spent much time around secondhand book stores, I'm guessing? Yes, there are absolutely diamonds out there. And even outside of that, there are lots of perfectly good used books. Books don't go bad over time, so unless they're damaged (which isn't most of them) they are still perfectly saleable.

[voxadam]

Powell's here in Portland seems to be doing pretty well with 68,000 square feet (6,300 square metres) sales floor space and millions of customers a year.

https://powells.com

[jrmg]

It’s a bit of a unicorn. It is of course a great book store - but it’s also a tourist destination. People travel to Portland just to see Powells. And it’s worth it!

[relistan]

This is true but I still can’t figure out why more stores don’t copy Powell’s used and new on the same shelves model. In retrospect it seems so obvious that this is a good idea. And Powell’s has been doing it for decades.

[alabastervlog]

> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged

This is true if you take any book whatsoever that someone wants to give or sell to you.

It is not true of any book store I've ever seen. They reject or recycle the crap.

It's sometimes true of shelves of books in flea markets. Rows of forgotten once-popular authors from the 1910s or whatever, that likely (for those particular copies, anyway) no human will ever read again, you do sometimes see.

[bpshaver]

> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.

> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.

> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.

Ugh.

[rendx]

> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors

I buy up to 10 (mostly non-fiction) books on paper a month, always secondhand if available, via bookfinder. You typically get a very accurate description of their state beforehand; I don't mind most levels of use, I actually like it when they have history to them. Markings, notes of previous owners, etc, are all fine for me. Even if one prefers "clean" books there are usually plenty of copies available. I like how it is both much cheaper than new, and even more the reuse aspect.

[csdvrx]

> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:

- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)

- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)

> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?

No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.

This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)

I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,

[SpaceManNabs]

> someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)

I wonder how this is offset by someone finding an item not worth enough to keep. But maybe I underestimate the generosity (or need for income) of the typical person visiting secondhand stores to offload their stuff.

[alabastervlog]

Some (many?) book stores do a lot of their intake via estate sales, not just buying from walk-ins. That gets them access to lots of interesting and well-cared-for, if sometimes niche, collections at low prices.

[Henchman21]

> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged

This is an odd take, to me.

When I was still in school, I’d seek out texts with as many handwritten notes in them as I could find! That was an added value for sure and one only available second-hand.

Now that eBooks are a thing I use them almost exclusively for schlock-type books: mass market paperbacks for well known SciFi franchises, for example, are all eBooks now. I wouldn’t buy these any other way now, but when I did buy paperbacks they went right to secondhand. The value for those was that they were cheaper.

But for any other type of book, if I am buying it, its a classic book. Maybe it won some awards, maybe it is even out of print!

None of this feels like a waste to me in any way, and I will admit I do not read a lot by the standards of folks here.

[SpaceManNabs]

> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?

Growing up poor, second hand book stores were how I found some of the best math books that I wouldn't have been able to afford. And they were often quite good or better (at least in offering diverse perspectives and angles) than the books I could have bought at the time.

I often liked the notes people left.

[karaterobot]

I don't want to just downvote and move on without an explanation. You're basically offering some of the arguments this article brings up and then dismisses, with evidence, so it seems like you didn't read the article and are offering your personal opinion as an argument.

[toofy]

im not sure this is at all accurate. the book stores around here that carry a good selection are always packed.