Back on topic…
Ah, the days when one could go to the mall, and browse through two different computer game stores, three bookstores, and two music stores. Halcyon past, indeed.
I’ve mentioned it before, I think. I loved the smell of any bookstore. Some folks like the new car smell. I like the bookstore smell.
Record stores are more fun. (Well, not the ones in the mall.)
Man, I went to Powell’s in Portland… it was my own personal heaven. I spent two hours, and barely covered one floor. There are 4 total floors.
I deeply regret the closing of Coliseum Books in NYC. All the remaining independent bookstores in the city are small and quaint, except for the Strand, which mainly stocks used books. But Coliseum was big enough for every last new release as well as a reasonable quantity of books from previous seasons. Nothing like it exists anymore in the city, because Barnes & Noble just doesn’t get it done, wasting too much of their floorspace on cafes and crap gifts to maintain a decent stock of books. And the nearest city to where I live, Boston, barely even has small and quaint bookshops left.
I forgot this smell but then went shopping in an amazon bookstore here a little while back. It really is a distinct nostalgia filled scent.
I also think it’s funny that amazon systematically put every physical book store out of business essentially and then started opening up physical stores.
And now that Toys r Us is dead, Amazon is putting out a Christmas toy catalog this year.
And somehow Amazon continues to avoid antitrust action despite utterly destroying the book retail industry and bullying the publishing industry. I shed no tears for B&N, but there comes a point where market domination has to be adjusted. And that point came something like 15 years ago.
Because they aren’t like buying everyone out really. They’re just making a better product.
Of course without Net Neutrality any competition will never be allowed to compete, but I’m sure Bezos will cut some checks to Congresscritters and solve any anti-trust issues. Cause you know he wont be paying his employees more or anything crazy.
B&N was actually in position to compete with the Nook. And then they shit the bed. My dad owned one and when he passed I got it. I tried to get books for it. I literally couldn’t get most things I wanted. I don’t know the details, I just know that anytime I wanted something on the Nook, it wasn’t available. Then I got a Kindle and I can get literally anything, even if it’s sometimes overpriced.
Even if you just make a better product, even if you are just flat out more efficient than your competitors, you still can’t annihilate an entire industry without being regulated. And of course Amazon did it by deliberately operating at a loss for years and years through the magic of exploiting idiot investors with the new revenue-not-profits tech company valuation that allowed it to cannibalize its own stock. Until at last, having crushed all competition, they were able to turn a profit. And even now they exploit new sectors by operating at a loss until the competition goes away.
I remember Walmart did that to my college town back in the mid-90s. They opened a brand new Supercenter, and sold food at prices that none of the local grocery stores could match. The students, like me, were so happy. A full loaf of bread for 25 cents? We were all over that, never went to the other stores after that. And sure enough, all the other grocery stores in town went out of business in two years, so by my senior year, prices at Walmart were back to above what we used to pay at other stores, and they only had one other store left to compete against.
Toy stores, pet stores, bookstores, Spencers Gifts, Orange Julius, Mrs. Fields Cookies, Hot Dog on a Stick - the mall was the awesome back then.
I am part of the problem. Once the iPad came out, I haven’t bought a physical book that wasn’t a coffee table book or a text book. I’m all-in on the Kindle books.
Oh, how I loved Coliseum Books. Particularly when it lived just south of Columbus Circle. I would go there a few times a week, it seemed, as I caught the subway there.
I didn’t frequent it as much, but Gotham Book Mart, first on 45th Street and then on 47th was a jewel. They had James Joyce discussion groups (among many others) and a reading lounge.
Why are investors idiots for being more interested in a company that’s looking at being successful over the long-term instead of the usual shortsighted approach many companies take of just doing whatever will boost profit in the short term, even if that hurts the company in the the long term.
I’d say the end result shows pretty clearly that those investors weren’t idiots.
Yeah, I once read a science fiction book (by Fred Pohl, I’m pretty sure) where all video entertainment was generically referred to as “Disneys.” We’re halfway there.
You might mean John Varley (though Pohl could certainly have done so too)
I have read a lot of Pohl and I don’t remember that reference.
Varley used Disneys for theme parks on the Moon in Steel Beach. Don’t recall other entertainment being referred to as such, though maybe in other stories set in that universe.
There’s another Eight Worlds book coming out soon