Quote:
Originally Posted by alucarda
Lol, maybe life in rural France is not the same as life in Prague or Budapest. My idea of Europe I must say refers to a lifestyle more closer related to Central and South-East Europe and not rural France. And of course online shops are nice thing to resort to, but every small town should have one or two of these quirky shops with more then one antiquary shop for books. And most towns in areas of Europe I mentioned have that. Same as I cant imagine every coffee shop in Prague turning into a Starbucks, I cant imagine every bookshop turning into chain store.
In comparison to where I'm currently living where 99.9% of shops are chain bookstores.
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Prague and Budapest are their own places; most of the bookstores I visited in the three years I lived in Germany and Austria had less charm than a mall store Waldenbooks. (The tendency to shelve books by publisher (!) didn't help). The stores were efficient operations if you knew the book you wanted, but they weren't set up for browsing.
I'm sure that there were plenty of quirky bookstores in Berlin and (maybe) Munich, but the ones around me were pretty barren and uninviting. Particularly when compared to, say, a B&N or Borders (RIP).