A trip to a bookstore, for a large section of the book-loving populace, is indeed something of value beyond just "curation" – the experience of browsing shelves, randomly finding or remembering something you wanted to read, seeing new releases on a table and judging the quality of the paper or the binding or appreciating the rag of the edges – none of this can be reproduced online. While you certainly don't have to appreciate them personally, many folks do.
borderlands empirically demonstrates that is not a very large populace, or perhaps that populace was enjoying serendipity at borderlands then buying from amazon
ps -- some of that serendipity is available online too; see eg the big ideas -- authors talking some aspect of their novels -- on John Scalzi's site. Of the fiction books I've read in the last 3 years, probably 80% of them have come from reading these posts. http://whatever.scalzi.com/category/big-idea/
from the OP: "2014 was the best year we've ever had". Serendipity yes can be found online - no recommendations I've seen have ever approached Amazon's (once I fed my data into them), especially a quickly-shuttered (too creepy?) and now not-remembered program that harvested recommendations via pairing you with folks who'd rated/owned/purchased similar things. That said, it was mostly the experience of physicality that I was referring to, although there is something distinct about browsing physical shelves, a hard-to-capture mix of weight, quality, and visual-imprint – spine design and relative length of titles being nearly invisible online; anecdotally one can see reports of authors captive to Amazon's self-publishing ecosystem writing shorter and shorter books in order to capitalize on per/title payments from their Prime lending program.
Ah, I see what you meant. There's still the Strand, but perhaps thats the kind of thing that can only exist in nyc.
While I buy math books in paper, for fiction I only buy ebooks. The backlight for reading in a shared bed without a lamp on is a killer feature for me and probably many others.
The Strand in NYC, Powell's in Portland, and a number of more local ones at a smaller scale. New/used bookstores definitely aren't dead, they just survive in areas with more bookish populations (the entire city of Portland would riot for days if Powell's ever threatened to close).
I like the "treat it as a cultural institution and charge admission" solution, if that's what it takes to avoid closing. A few dollars would totally be worth it for an hour-long leisurely browse.
Re:Borderlands Books is Closing
by walterbell on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @03:43PM
(#8993217)
Maybe bookstores could charge a pay-what-you-want admission fee, like museums.
It's also a function of demand elasticity whether cost increases are passed to consumers, eaten by businesses, or some combination. We'll see how much pricing power local businesses have.
And it's a real stretch to argue that a small business owner earning under $30k/year, with limited growth prospects, is an efficient deployment of capital. This was clearly a labor of love.