Quote:
Originally Posted by Philippe D.
B&M bookshops do some important and useful work: they select the books they want to display, and can give some useful advice.
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They
can give useful advice, but the vast majority of general-stock (i.e., Borders, B&N, etc., not something like Mysterious Books in NYC) bookstores have nobody that can help you with what
you want. They might have a clerk who can point out what the clerk likes, but almost none have a clerk who can give a meaningful answer to "I like pretty much everything
some older author has written...do you know of any new authors like them?"
On the other hand, Amazon has this built in...every book has a "people who bought this also bought" and "people who bought this also looked at", and the author pages have "similar" authors listed based on those same criteria. Add in the rest of the Internet (blogs, discussion sites, etc.), and chances that you have a local B&M bookstore that can give you anything value-added are pretty slim.
Last, if you want e-books, I can't see what a B&M has to offer.