Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
Your typical bookstore carries 20,000 books; a "superstore" carries 100,000. B&N's ebook store, in its infancy, has around 200,000 titles plus another 850,000+ public domain books via Google. An ebook store with 20,000 titles would be regarded (correctly) as a crippled joke.
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So to me, selling ebooks in a bookstore is a foolish and desperate attempt to save an aspect of commerce that is about to get threshed.
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Assuming the only purpose of a bookstore is to sell books, you're correct. And the only purpose of a car is to transport you from here to there-and who needs a 2-ton behemoth to do that? But they sell, don't they?
That's because the cars (and bookstores) fulfill emotional needs that go beyond the physical 'functionality' of books & transportation. Emotional needs are rarely logical, but they exist.
You might be right that bookstores will disappear-depends on how many people are willing to pay for fulfilling their emotional 'need' (need might be a little strong, but that seems to be the term that's usually used) to browse thru physical bookshelves. I tend to agree with you that bookstores will eventually disappear, I just think it'll take some more improvement in the ebook buying experience before they do. Right now I don't find choosing & buying an ebook nearly as satisfying as choosing & buying a book in a bookstore.
Written English (and possibly other languages) makes it hard to distinguish different meanings of words by tone/emphasis. So my following probably won't make sense when you first read it-but 'play it back with different emphasis' and I think you'll eventually see what I'm trying to say. And maybe you can even rephrase it to actually say that. I don't seem to be able to, but others are much better at writing than I am.
Anyway, I find shopping for a book online very convenient when I'm trying to find the book that I want, but not nearly as satisfying as shopping in a bookstore when I'm trying to find a book that I want. I could probably go into several paragraphs trying to explain that, but hopefully you'll understand what I'm trying to say.