No way I would ever risk buying such books from Amazon. I am concerned about the condition it would arrive in, scams and delays.
I bought a second book based on a librarian's recommendation. There was only 5 or 6 books of the kind I was interested in. It made choosing one easier.
Amazon is tainted brand.
Books are ridiculously easy to counterfeit, and can bring in quite a bit of cash.
Amazon has made the conscious business decision to be a counterfeit souk. I guess they make lots of money from it, and I suspect they don’t really care about their retail brand anymore. From what I hear, it’s actually a loss leader.
i assume the problem is complacency. I don’t think buying real solid books has really changed on Amazon at all in past 5 years. kindle digital reader is same as it was 5 years ago. i wonder how many people work in kindle and what they actually do.
so as you could guess customer benefit is not primary or even second third focus.
company leadership create culture of one incentive. workers output optimizing for that incentive.
It's not only about you.
(And I know DFW is dead, but he has an estate. And living authors have bills to pay.)
And that is the best case of a readable, complete book. Maybe you get only the first 500 pages, or the figures are cut off, or it is a degraded scan of a printed book.
The problem is of course much worse for collectible books for which even getting an official reprint or a different edition instead of the real thing would be a problem.
A book is a bunch of words, delivered to a reader via some medium. In order for a book to work, the words must all be delivered in readable format; whether printed out on a physical media, or delivered electronically, as text strings.
Because of that, copying the text is trivial. I have a scanner, under my desk, that will completely scan a book, if I unbind that book, and drop in the pages. I also have software that will OCR those scans. I have heard of OCR software that does a lot better than mine.
Writing a book is hard. I mean, really hard. I've done it. It can take months for an author to write a book that I can read in a couple of days (unless the author is Mercedes Lackey, or James Patterson).
Software is similar. Once it is written, reproducing it is trivial. After all, it's just a bunch of words. To make it even more convenient, almost all software is already rendered into electronic form.
With both of these, the only thing preventing anyone from simply copying the text, is the law, and there are lots of people (nations, even) that have absolutely no respect at all for the law. They will happily copy and reproduce the text.
It's entirely possible to have counterfeits of higher quality than the original. You could, for instance, sell a fancy, gilt-edged, leather-bound version of a book that has only been released as a mass-market paperback.
But what gives it real value, is the text.
You could steal software that drives a fairly humble Web site, and convert it to drive a megasite, or a design for a limited edition, artisanal product, and turn it into a cheap, mass-market knockoff.
In any of these cases, the originator of the text; whether an author, or a programmer, derives zero gain from it, and it can actually do damage to them, as the knockoffs could have real problems, and do brand damage, or the fake book could be published with the seal of the real publisher, and that publisher could see reputational damage, if the book contains textual errors (like lots of OCR'd books do).
It's a fairly big topic, and there are organizations that are dedicated to either freeing up artistic copyright, or overenforcing it.
The basic deal, is that, if you want art, you need to compensate the artist enough to make that art. AI might be at the point where that art could be faked, but I'm not sure if we are really there, or this is all a bunch of hype.
What I received looked like the cover head been designed in Word. Solid red, some generic oil painting print, and black text. The contents of the book was even worse. It looked like it was printed on a dot matrix or something.
Needless to say I returned it and have not bought a book from Amazon since.
I started looking for rare, expensive and/or old books that I know about, and at the first result page I realized how futile it was, between unknown quality, unknown marketplace sellers, unreliable listings, the chance of scammers, and the ridiculously inaccurate mass of irrelevant search results that drown out relevant ones.
Other people actually recommended, in harsh terms, to buy electronics etc. on Amazon and get books and games from proper sources.
It is quite obvious to the mass public, not a special insight, that Amazon doesn't love to sell stuff: not only books and media, but anything except maybe Prime subscriptions.
I use Amazon as a primary source for stuff that I know are generic, don't care about knockoffs and want variety. i.e iPad cases, simple furniture
It is unfortunate but understandable if you get scammed buying a pair of "certified" Apple earbuds or lightening cables from a Chinese seller at a price 70% less than you'd pay at Apple, Fair enough and buyer beware.
But if you can't even buy a BOOK that's sold by Amazon itself without getting scammed, then it seems we have a serious problem, and it is not surprising that Amazon stock is down over 50%.
it’s maddening the direction these companies are pulling us towards.
I might want to revisit this in a year or two.
I'm rarely that desperate but Amazon delivery beats petrol costs here and can take only a day longer (assuming goods are even on the shelf locally).
I can get it from bookshop.org on Friday too, but it is £15.50, vs Amazon's £10.50.
I can trust my local bookstores.
France and a few other countries have the right idea here - the same book always costs the same, regardless if it's on Amazon, local bookstore, big chain store. There's a unique price set country-wide for the edition, and that's it, they have to compete on other things.
Ordering books not in stock also wasn't possible at a lot of stores and, when you could, it often took many weeks.
Boy was I wrong, and I'll happily eat crow for how wrong I was. The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read. They also do a great job making the building welcoming and accessible to all, while at the same time preventing it from getting trashed by the homeless (looking at you SF public library) with a simple no sleeping/no lying down rule.
Welcoming, inviting public spaces can do very well if people understand why they are desirable.
(I haven't been to the SF public library in a while, but the few times I went in as a Mozilla intern the staff were so rude I ended up buying books and selling them at a used bookstore when finished rather than be treated rudely by folks who were within a year or two of me, from the same department I graduated from. Maybe there's a reason people don't respect that space, and it's not just because they're mentally ill and/or down on their luck.)
The problem is similar to what happened when low income housing (the "projects") concentrated the poor into economic ghettos.
If they're "poor", don't they have to rent or buy low income housing, and so "concentrate into economic ghettos"?
There is no policy concentrating the poor with each other, any more than there is a policy that concentrates the rich with each other. The market makes available different products, and different economic market segments purchase different products. With a policy, or without a policy, the poor will live with the poor.
And form "economic ghettos".
I prefer it being a homeless shelter, its cold as hell in chicago right now. It would be nice for them to have some some space there.
Whenever there is a cold wave we all wonder whats happening to the ppl left out there. It would be nice for them to have one more option. give everyone else peace of mind, lol.
They adapted and drew in new users. How awful.
I myself have been coming in and out of their space trying to job hunt.
(Turns out a common trope is people don't want to socialize with someone who "lives with their parents" or is un/under employed.)
So picture you're trying to study for OSCP, and you can't find a space that's quiet. In a library.
And what you'd think would happen is someone would go "oh, you're in IT? I know someone looking for that" and solve the issue.
And then instead, they treat it like a game -- or worse, start acting purposefully othering.
That is my core complaint -- that both those spaces and those resources in the monetary sense divert disproporionately to folks who, frankly, sometimes interact in ways that make me question why they strive so hard to interact with teenagers all day.
(Also, it was often not new users -- just bigger, more elaborate programs for the same rich kids from the suburbs who used to pay for special camps and programs... but now having them held in spaces those who couldn't afford them used to do self education.)
I hope taking the time and energy to type that out helps.
Someone else commented that the library is one of the last noncommercial spaces... I honestly don't have that impression at all. I got the sense if you're not using it to do remote work, or as a community center, but to... check out materials and use them... you are unwelcome unless you're buying stuff (coffee, supplies etc) or part of one of the groups that makes substantial donations when they're not making noise.
They have spaces for business meetings, rooms for night classes, groups to meet and so on!
They really are a wonderful mix of community services.
Plus libraries are still a great place to take young children. They often have seperate kids areas where you can spend an hour or two with toddlers.
Libraries arnt stuffy old quiet buildings anymore!
The building is open until 11pm 4 days a week, with reduced hours on Friday and Saturday; closed on Sunday. I guess it's no surprise that the website describes as more of a "Multifunctioneel Centrum" as opposed to just a library!
(For those not living in the area, this is the largest of the Washington, DC, public libraries, downtown at 9th and G NW.)
But the number of tourists in NYC compared to Boston is probably a big difference.
If I’m coworking in NYC sometime, maybe I’ll ask what kind of research I must be doing to get to read there. I’m guessing with the physical books only available there?
Fun factoid about NYPL: it's a private nonprofit, not a municipal establishment like many other libraries.
It's a logistics and resources problem - libraries are: shelter, safety, heating/cooling, running water, restrooms, a place to sit... Truth is we don't afford that to everyone here and a lot of people ignore the cruelty/suffering. Hell - some even justify and celebrate it.
What other free indoor facilities existed in the past?
I think it's fine to encourage people to spend time at the library. I know as a kid, I grew a lot as a person at our local library.
They had after school activities once a week, it was about a mile down the road, so we had to learn to be responsible walking after school. The librarians were always kind to us, even though I'm sure as teenagers we probably weren't always a carbon copy of the model, upstanding citizen.
I could spend time with my friends discussing various topics, with easy information available if we couldn't agree on the facts. Plus, I kissed my wife for the first time on the bench outside. Libraries are great :)
You're expected to donate, you're just allowed not to.
https://sfist.com/2013/08/27/were_doomed_sf_main_library_bat...
And yes, with children access to a bathroom is necessary.
Also now elsewhere and going to library is so fun. We can bike etc. they are reasonably strict though. No sex, drugs, sleeping etc
I contrast that with the library in Austin. Obviously, as a free, warm, comfortable space, there are tons of homeless people there. But, unlike in SF, the Austin library doesn't let them trash the place - the homeless there are just using the library like everyone else. There is a strict no sleeping/lying rule (which I've seen enforced) which prevents anyone from basically taking over a section of the library. The bathrooms have always been immaculate whenever I've used them.
IMO the Austin library's policy toward the homeless shows how you can be respectful and welcoming to all while still requiring everyone who enters to respect the building.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
The below article seems to indicate and average of around 700k in the EU.
https://www.greaterchange.co.uk/post/does-europe-have-a-home...
I don't believe there are many other parts of the world where this happens.
It has become an incredibly valuable community hub. Books are a bit of an excuse to enjoy its architecture and function. I've been there for countless hours with my children as they have grown up.
I'm also consistently impressed by the staff. In a time when every business is complaining about staffing and using it as an excuse for bad quality and bad service, it seems that most libraries are staffed with total professionals who do their job day in and day out and do it well.
I even met the librarian who invented the phrase “surfing the internet” at a librarian conference. Yes, a librarian was there to coin phrases at the dawn of the web!
A bit of internet surfing turned up her story about it: https://www.netmom.com/surfing/birth-of-a-metaphor
Many Canadian cities are upgrading their libraries and i for one am overjoyed to see that!
> The new library building is beautiful, super inviting and some of my favorite architecture anywhere. I love going there to work or read.
Im confused. Why did you initially oppose it? Seems like you like it because its nice but surely that wasn't your original concern.
Because the less well off may not have enough devices or internet access to do things digitally. It's also good if you have young kids. You can't read that book which has different textures for all the animals digitally.
Is that really still true? I've traveled in many poor counties where people live in shacks with no plumbing, yet still all have internet connected smartphones. Only in the most remote villages with no electricity or phone signal are people still truly disconnected.
In AU, you can still get really cheap prepaid plans that don't really have a lot of data all things considered. For example, right now I can get an Amaysim SIM for $100, and you get 60GB for 365 days. https://www.amaysim.com.au/plans/long-expiry-plans/
This is roughly 165MB a day. Probably amazing compared to a poor country, but it's all relative.
In FF, incognito window, uBlock origin allowed in incognito windows: - google.com is 500kB - twitter.com is 4MB - tiktok.com is 5MB - youtube.com is 6MB - facebook.com is 300kB - Commonwealth's Netbank is 2MB
This is not even considering all the other data you need for using those websites. If your mobile phone and your mobile data is your main source of connectivity, it's really easy to blow through it all just on basic things.
For example, the best overall plan I've used anywhere in the world is in Thailand. You can get unlimited 10Mbit service for $5 a month. The coverage is extremely good even in the mountains or islands, latency is excellent, and I've used over 100 GB without hitting any additional throttles. And that's with AIS. There are cheaper companies and plans if you wanted.
The worst thing being that, of course, the libraries in rich neighborhoods have no homeless people and are generally nicer.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Birmingham * https://www.oodihelsinki.fi/en/ * https://wellcomecollection.org/pages/Wuw19yIAAK1Z3Smm * https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org/
others?
https://www.architectmagazine.com/project-gallery/john-henry...
https://www.library.nashville.org/
PS: +1 to Austin’s library. It’s an incredible space. Grab a coffee at the cafe, and hang out on the beautiful roof terrace. Breathtaking views, and it’s a great place to meet people (and what better people to meet than library people!); PS: they are building a makerspace there too - stay tuned…
A few have managed to keep going (mostly due to the communities taking direct control) and they have done wonders in keep up with the times.
It's a great place, just wish there was free parking.
They are important - maybe the most important - library customers.
It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive.
Amazon treats me like a deadbeat, even though I buy lots of books from them.
For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it.
Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in.
I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.
We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'
Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle.
I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable.
I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace.
Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.
The recommendations you would get inside a bookstore have nothing to do with this kind of experience. You are having an actual conversation about what you like and are looking for.
In a store the person has to go out of their way every time they recommend the same book. It's one-to-one vs. one-to-many. There's more of a chance they really do think highly of the book, maybe even years after reading it. That's valuable.
Did you use the present tense to describe the past, before James Daunt took over, perhaps? I could understand "the key insight was that bookstores were no longer places to get books," but the entire article seems to be about how B&N has become a place to get books, because the CEO loves books, and empowers local stores to also love books and therefore sell them well.
For a long time, the fact that the bookstore was the _only_ place to “get books” occluded the fact that it was the _best_ place to explore and appreciate books. Amazon stripped away the veneer by showing that, actually, bookstores weren’t so ideal for “getting books” after all (book not carried, book not in stock, can’t find the right shelf, etc). Daunt is therefore succeeding by refocusing on “loving books,” as you put it, rather than on transacting books.
You might “get books” at a bookstore, but that’s probably not why you went there in the first place.
New B&N is much more focused on transacting (whether its books or other merchandise) than at any time in its past history. That’s why it works: B&N in the past has focused more than the current B&N on speculative/aspirational attempts to build demand and novel businesses (whether its effectively selling prime space for publisher’s promotions as discussed in the article, or the attempt to build B&N’s own Nook business by large dedications of space, or B&N’s bizarre restaurant business), the current version is focused on stocking and moving what the local stores know they can move.
I don't know that I really disagree with anything you're saying about discovery and so on, but you keep describing it as a key insight of the article which doesn't seem to talk about it even a little bit. It sounds like your key insight, maybe, although the article seems to offer counter-evidence to your claim.
> Amazon seems invincible. … If [Toys R Us] couldn’t compete with Amazon, how could B&N hope to do any better?
> Daunt started giving more power to the stores,”
for example by
> ask[ing] employees in the outlets to take every book off the shelf, and re-evaluate whether it should stay.
I suppose I drew from this that those local employees were producing a better atmosphere for book-browsers than publishers’ marketing budgets had, and took that as evidence of this “discovery” strategy. Does that strike you as a stretch?
The “get books” wording may have been more confusing than clever. For my part, I hoped to convey that I (maybe you too?) go to B&N to browse books even when I’m not looking for anything in particular, not that I go for things other than books.
But it's more of a place to discover books. That's what the CEO did.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Books_and_Music
They are a case study in business school that selling tchotchkes and trinkets is more profitable than books. I disagree with GP's article. It is the same myth in tech that "engineers make better founders" and "companies ran by execs with engineering backgrounds are more successful". It is feel-good masturbation for professionals without objective data backing it. In this case they are running with "booklovers run better bookstores". Not necessarily generalizable to all booksellers. The pandemic has shown that cheap rates play an oversized role in picking winners and losers.
I think the lesson may be that B&N wanted to be a successful bookstore and they achieved that by doing a better job serving book buyers mostly by giving individual stores more autonomy. That doesn’t mean another chain couldn’t succeed by turning into a books & trinkets store with a focus on high margin trinkets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/booksupdate/indigo-...
Many paths to the same destination.
Bookstores always were places to make discoveries, to learn, to have people recommend books for you. My first bookstore experiences go back to the late 70s, and the ones that stick in my mind as memorable? Two stores that had fiercely opinionated voracious readers as employees, who both knew books and their customers. (I could literally go there, as a kid, and ask "what book do I want to get my dad for Christmas", and they'd inevitably make fabulous recommendations that I wasn't old enough yet to figure out by myself)
This extends beyond bookstores - all stores are ultimately in the business of caring about customers and being deeply knowledgable about what they sell. The rest is logistics.
Still miss that store :)
Still, now I'm deeply interested in reading an account of how different book selling systems in the 80s worked. (Yes, I'm avoiding other tasks, why do you ask? ;)
But I feel like they succumbed to the same problem B&N did here, for different reasons -- they became full of kitchen gadgets and devices, because people were buying more things and less books on Amazon itself, and the stores started to mirror that.
But is that a property of the recommendations or of the circumstances under which they are received?
It's possible that the quality of a recommendation generated by an AI based on psychological profiles is superior, so that if it was followed, the book would be enjoyed. But it's not being followed, because it appears too unlikely and the reader doesn't trust the AI.
If that's true, the competitive advantage of the physical interaction would not actually be the recommendations themselves, but the atmosphere it creates which makes readers susceptible to listening to them.
Now, some people, maybe most even, will try and do the same to you. But not all, and store owner can optimize for those who won't.
But one thing especially is the “friend activity”. There are some friends that I have connected with whom have a similar reading preference to me. Discovering what they are reading / have read and rated has influenced my buying decisions quite often. When I lived near those friends, we would talk about the books as we had more contact, but since moving halfway across the world that does not happen as often. Goodreads is great for that (imo).
That cannibalizes the bookstore you like to visit.
FWIW, this was considered common sense when I was in library school 20 years ago: that is to say, it was presented to us as a fact rather than a question. I don't think this was a unique or novel insight by B&N, rather a question of execution in the transformation of an already large company and, I suppose, the financial discipline to survive the competition.
Borders is already out of business, and BAM! looks like it's on its way (it's no longer public so financials are difficult to know, but part time employees report that they get more or fewer hours based on how many gift cards they sell, which indicates cash flow problems).
BN is the only one doing well, and it's my opinion that this is due to being a comfortable place to buy and read books. By contrast, book selection at BAM! is atrocious, and the cafes all seem cold, uninviting, and surrounded by gimmicks and toys.
If I want a specific book, I already know where to go: the internet. No physical store is ever going to compete on inventory ever again. Amazon will eat you alive.
I go to bookstores to discover new books, and to enjoy the feeling of being around books and the people who love them. The CEO realized this, and leaned in hard.
It's a really, really smart recognition of when passion for the product is actually a business advantage, and not just a warm fuzzy.
It's very hard to do good recommendations -- even for Amazon/Goodreads! -- without people who care about what they're recommending. Those recommendations are now a bookstore's real product.