| I've bought over 100 books in the last 6 months. Maybe more. I wouldn't step foot into any of the bookshops proposed here. 70% of so of my books are from a local thrift shop. We go every week and buy a stack of books at a time. There's stuff here that you don't find anywhere because it's coming from people cleaning out bookshelves that are decades old. I think the Internet has made the printed book even _more_ important, largely because so many people are ignoring it. Information is only valuable if it's asymmetrical: the ease and abundance of online information makes you feel informed, but usually just results in me-too thinking. Jonathan Franzen notes in an essay that people used to wait for the next great novel like we wait for summer movies. I believe he goes on to lament the fact. I think this change is for the better; the book has transmuted into a source of arcane information that's of real consequence in business, writing, or, best of all, just living. With that in mind, the bookshop shouldn't emphasize what's popular, "curated", or recommended. Give me things no one else is reading. I want Zafon's Cemetery of Forgotten Books, not "Yo! Sushi". A few specific responses to the article: Recommendations: Amazon's recommendation engine never gives me good suggestions. I think it's because once you've read something you like your thinking evolves and you want something _different_, not something similar. For that reason, I would be really skeptical of the digital suggestion features these proposals tout. Social: reading is anti-social. Period. It should enrich your ideas and conversation without people noticing. Nobody is impressed that you're carrying around _Infinite Jest_. e-books: the materiality of a book is crucial. I can often remember spatially where something is in a book. Underlining physically helps attach ideas. When you flip through the book, the lines don't flow to different pages each time you read (very annoying when trying to dig up quotes later). You're not going to read that many books in your life, the expense of physical books isn't really a good excuse. This is probably all really terrible business advice for booksellers. |
That's very true. The question is - how do you use the internet(which i believe is more suited than book stores to that task), to find such valuable asymmetric information ?