I miss browsing libraries and book stores

[DiapDealer]

They're all doing it wrong and only I know how to do it right.

[frahse]

[QUOTE=RobFreundlich;3675021]I miss the experience of going to the book store or library, picking a section ("genre", for those of you who only ever shop online), and just looking around./Quote


Yes, yes, me too.

A worthy statement. (I have done near the most I can for you!)

[darryl]

How many times do I need to say it. If you want the experience of going to the bookstore or library just go. They do still exist you know.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by darryl

How many times do I need to say it. If you want the experience of going to the bookstore or library just go. They do still exist you know.

Unfortunately, Darryl, when the nearest good bookshop is a 3h round trip away, it's not always as simple as "just go"!

[darryl]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Unfortunately, Darryl, when the nearest good bookshop is a 3h round trip away, it's not always as simple as "just go"!

A good point Harry, which I suspect is only going to get worse as more bookstores close. Those who are in this position through bookstore closures have my sympathy.

[Thasaidon]

[QUOTE=darryl;3676328]A good point Harry, which I suspect is only going to get worse as more bookstores close. Those who are in this position through bookstore closures have my sympathy.[/QUOTE

When I moved to the Philippines a couple of years ago things were deteriorating badly in the UK.

In Doncaster where I lived we used to have five bookshops selling new books and seven or eight who only sold second hand books. When I left the only shop selling new books was W.H.Smiths, which also sells newspaper, magazines, toys, CDs, DVDs and stationary. Books although a major line was only one of many. The secondhand bookshops are down to two paperback exchanges and are barely hanging on due to ever increasing rents.

Things are nearly as bad with public libraries. Local Government has cut funding regularly over the years until we do not even have a skeleton service but are down to the marrow. My old local branch library, like many others has only been kept open because local people are doing for free the jobs that paid librarians used to be employed to do. This is despite the heavy usage the library gets. Many others have been closed or have had their opening hours greatly reduced. How long the before the Local council cuts off all funding is anyone's guess.

So I was in much the same situation as HarryT.

Fortunately ebooks came along and saved the day.

But I do miss browsing secondhand bookshops and my old branch library in Sheffield. Occasionally I would come across a very interesting book I would never have thought would have interested me . Then there is the smell and feel of the books and the conversations with booksellers.

In the Philippines where I currently live books are expensive and even second hand copies sell for nearly the cover price. If you can find a (rare) second hand book shop. But I can tell you they are usually crowded.

[darryl]

Book prices remain sky high in Australia, agency flourishes and the local industry is a protected species. Parallel Import provisions remain. Yet we still see fewer and fewer book stores. One large shopping centre in Sydney years ago had three specialist bookstores as well as substantial book departments in some other stores. Until recently it was down to one specialist book store and some much reduced book departments in some other stores. The specialist store, QBD, is part of a local chain which is defying trends with its own unique layout, including substantial discounting. With shades of Amazon books, it displays discounted new releases face out and other heavily discounted books on tables in neat rows, face up. Another specialist bookstore, Henry Hartog has opened more recently, and seems to be more a traditional bookstore. When I visited discounts were nowhere on offer. Despite the fact it is in a large shopping centre the store was taking the social/community route, with book readings, events etc. I'd say the jury is still out on this one. The smaller but still very substantial shopping centre in another state which I now frequent has one specialist bookstore, again QBD. The suburb has a traditional shop-front second-hand bookshop on the fringes of the centre of town, which would satisfy all of you who love the smell and the dust and browsing endless shelves. I seldom visit as they don't have ebooks. The mega bookshops once dotted around the suburbs have all gone the way of the dodo, although a handful still exist in the CBD of the big cities.

We still have great libraries. I'm a member and do sometimes visit the main branch, which is in a modern building with a wonderful spacious atrium, tables and chairs and a small cafe. Most of my dealings are of course online borrowing ebooks and audiobooks. The atrium area is a great place to relax and read an ebook whilst enjoying a coffee and snack. If I was so inclined they do have author visits and talks, book clubs, short courses and various other activities. They also have a good local history section in a separate area upstairs. They offer of course paper books, ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, newspapers, movies, music and of course computers for public use.

My feeling is that bookstores are in decline everywhere. I don't see them ever vanishing, but I think they are continually losing customers, and areas which used to support many of them now support only a few. This is a trend. On the other hand, I can only see libraries here becoming more popular. Certainly here they seem to be very well patronised and are providing more and more services. Perhaps things are different in other areas in Australia, or perhaps libraries are faring better here than in the UK. My observation here is that bookstores are declining but libraries are going from strength to strength. I'd be interested to hear what people in the US and other countries think, or even others in Australia whose experience and opinion may differ.

[DiapDealer]

Living in rural America, I have been a three-hour round-trip away from a decent bookstore since my love for reading blossomed in the early '70s.

There was a tiny christian bookstore in town that closed when I was very young (and a news-stand that had a handful of best-sellers that closed before I got out of high-school). We had a tiny, largely unsatisfying library, yes, but other than that, I never had a real chance to fall in love with browsing physical bookstores that contained books I wanted to read. That's why online bookstores (pre-ebook) were such a godsend to me. And then ebooks made things even better.

Before that (and until I went off to college), it was me selecting books from one of those school programs where you ordered them and got them six weeks later, Christmas and birthday wishlists, and those rare Sunday trips to a "big city" bookstore with whatever money I'd managed to scrape together. And then of course the occasional road-trip after I had my driver's license.

So phooey on B&M bookstores. Don't miss 'em one bit. They didn't do a thing for me. If it hadn't been for inter-library loans, I wouldn't have been able to read much of anything from my local library either.

EDIT: by the way. Does anyone remember the name of any of those school programs? I've been searching with no luck whatsoever. It wasn't BookMobile, those were loans (though we had that, too). The one I remember had a "catalog" and an order-form that had check-boxes you checked beside the books you wanted. The day those stacks of bundled-up books showed up on the teachers desk were some the best days I remember from elementary school. I was never so happy as when I was lugging those things home after school (back when "book bags" were still day-packs for hikers)!

[Alpha o]

DiapDealer asked:

EDIT: by the way. Does anyone remember the name of any of those school programs? I've been searching with no luck whatsoever. It wasn't BookMobile, those were loans (though we had that, too). The one I remember had a "catalog" and an order-form that had check-boxes you checked beside the books you wanted. The day those stacks of bundled-up books showed up on the teachers desk were some the best days I remember from elementary school. I was never so happy as when I was lugging those things home after school (back when "book bags" were still day-packs for hikers)!

We had the free Weekly Reader. It did offer a catalog of sale books for the teacher or it could have had some listed in each issue. It was a looong time ago.

[haertig]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

...by the way. Does anyone remember the name of any of those school programs? I've been searching with no luck whatsoever...

Scholastic Book Club?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Before that (and until I went off to college), it was me selecting books from one of those school programs where you ordered them and got them six weeks later... Does anyone remember the name of any of those school programs? I've been searching with no luck whatsoever... The one I remember had a "catalog" and an order-form that had check-boxes you checked beside the books you wanted. The day those stacks of bundled-up books showed up on the teachers desk were some the best days I remember from elementary school. I was never so happy as when I was lugging those things home after school (back when "book bags" were still day-packs for hikers)!

I'm pretty sure you are thinking of the Scholastic Book Club. I share the same happy memories. I loved looking through their catalog (the Arrow) that was printed on this extra thin paper.

If you Google Scholastic book club order form you'll see 'em.



The school I drive past on the way to work is having their book fair. Even though I'm obviously not going there myself, I still get an excited feeling remembering the book fairs when I was a kid.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Alpha o

We had the free Weekly Reader. It did offer a catalog of sale books for the teacher or it could have had some listed in each issue. It was a looong time ago.

I used to read the Weekly Reader cover-to-cover.

[DiapDealer]

I think you guys are right, it WAS Scholastic Book Club. Thanks! Every search for some variation on "school book program" was bringing up stuff about buying textbooks.

The wait for the books was excruciating, but those were some vivid, very happy memories from my childhood.

[RobFreundlich]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Can I ask (seriously) what physical bookstore or library has ever been able to provide you that experience?

I get that you like the physical experience better, but the improvements you're wanting in the online experience don't actually seem to match up all that well with the advantages of physical browsing, in my opinion. i.e. "Quick sense of what the author is all about" or "see all the books of a series" or "quickly scanning large amounts of data" aren't things I associate with my trips to the book store.

• Quick sense of what the author is all about - reading blurbs from the back covers of a few books
• Quickly scanning large amounts of data - looking at the spines of the books. The combination of title, author, and font somehow gave me what I needed. I can't quantify it, but it worked.
• See all the books in a series - Pick up one book, see it's in a series, open up the cover, and the series is listed on the inside, usually on one of the first few pages. Granted, it's not all of the books in the series unless the book is the latest one published, but even that gave me information.

I think part of it is about the compactness of the information. Or maybe information vs. data.

In a physical book store, when you're looking at the "listing", you see only a few "fields" for each book, so you're seeing many books at once. Because you're seeing the important fields, you get a lot of important information at once.

In an online store, the listing shows you a lot of fields for each book, and you are limited to how many books you can see at once. Even if the site lets you show hundreds of books per page, because of the number of fields, your field of vision limits you to only a handful of books. And also because of the number of fields, the important stuff is lost in the noise. So you are getting a lot of data, but little information.

My opinion and experience, anyway.

[RobFreundlich]

Originally Posted by HarryT

How would you address the issue I raised in my previous post, Glenn: that of finding books on a particular topic when you don't have any specific books in mind? This really is virtually impossible to do in any of the current online bookstores!

Bingo! That's my point! I feel that online is great when you know exactly what you are looking for. But when you just want to browse around for awhile and pick out your next read, online doesn't cut it.