Yeah - I don’t see people paying money to get advice on what to read. Amazon does that pretty well too. And too many people kick tires in a retail store and then buy it cheaper elsewhere.
Eh, I hear what you’re saying (not to mention goodreads.com) but I think there’s an added value to a real conversation than a one-way reading on a website.
Plus, after working all day at a computer, I’m usually pretty reluctant to sit down and comb through a bunch of reviews written by anonymous weirdos. So yeah, it would just be one person’s opinion, but it might be more pleasantly acquired. Not sure it would be enough to sustain a business, but if the alternative is to completely go out of biz., it might be worth investigating.
1 Like
i know it’s nice and fashionable to go knock amazon around a bit, but to be blunt, i don’t really see them as the prime (heh.) evil here. in this particular case, it really seems to be a confluence of several factors: strong competition (yes, including amazon), diminishing strength of product sales (via competition from, among others, e-books) and a almost insane cost of living/doing business in the city they are doing business in (even though $15/hour seems like a fair amount by current standards, it’s probably not nearly enough for anyone to actually live in SF in anything other than perhaps a roach motel, but that’s just imo.)
i also can offer up an example that sorta partially exculpates amazon based on prior evidence – in my hometown of portland, OR, small and independent bookstores started dying off way before amazon was a gleam in jeff bezos eye – as far back as the early '90s. why? because of the 800 lbs gorilla that was/is powells books. now, i do love powells with all my heart, think it is as close to a proper local landmark for portland as we are likely ever to get and whatnot, but yeah, they killed small bookeries around here, plain and simple. once they decided to expand again and again and to try and keep pace with amazon as they rose to prominence, the whole thing just accelerated, but the damage was done long before that.
the musty bookstores i liked to visit as a student and post-college had all but disappeared by the time i ordered my first item from amazon and by the time i finally decided to kinda re-inventory my life and switch to e-books (when possible) 4-5 years ago, i honestly could not think of any regular brick-and-mortar (non-chain) stores around portland other than powells. buying new and used books around here just kinda became synonymous with going to powells.
in a sense we could just say this was part of the market regulating itself to the new order of things and whatnot, but in the end, it’s never that simple. is it amazon/powells fault for having a better business plan in a low-margin environment? sure, to some degree. but by that same logic, the consumers who do business there must share an equal load of blame for looking for price considerations/availability versus ambiance and locality – and a X factor in the case at hand here is obviously the ridiculousness of the local market.
i think it would be wiser to take a larger view of what happened here rather than just point fingers at the most obvious candidate.
4 Likes
That’s a solid and reasoned analysis, and I largely agree.
I was typing offhand, and using “Amazon” as shorthand for “all the economic changes that led to and come along with the existence of a monopoly online bookseller”.
In hindsight, that was pretty stupid phrasing.
I think you’re required to say “…weren’t so DAMN high…”
4 Likes
What are you buying? I also get books from Weightless books, Kobo, and (shameless plug for my own publisher) direct from Circlet Press. Honestly, I keep being surprised by how half-assed Google Play Books is. It really looks like their heart isn’t in it.
They tried that. They’ve had an attached, associated coffee shop for some time now. It hasn’t been especially successful, largely because Valencia street already has a staggering number of coffee shops.
1 Like
I’m buying mostly:
- Science fiction (current)
- Buddhist books
- Popular history
I mostly just buy from Amazon (best price) and remove the DRM and store them locally as a backup. I own a Kindle Paperwhite though I also have a Kobo mini. I have a bunch of stuff from Google Play that wasn’t available on Amazon in either a good edition or price. I read those on the Kobo (after removing DRM).
Not enough of a business to pay rents in the most expensive city in North America.
1 Like
Also in a particular district whose reputation as a quirky, interesting shopping district (once entirely deserved, but less so every year) has made retail space expensive by even local standards.
Very sad to know this.
Somewhat OT:
You know who really doesn’t build new housing for its tens of thousands of new workers? Silicon Valley, which isn’t even confined to a 7x7 mi² area.
Local governments dump housing problems onto the places that do build, mostly San Francisco and Oakland. For example, late last year, Mountain View approved plans to add 3.4 million square feet of office space around the Google and LinkedIn fortresses, adding 20,000 jobs. No new housing. Supposedly the newly elected City Council eventually will vote to allow 1,500 to 5,000 units in the area, but the other 15,000 are San Francisco's problem by default. - [Nato Green, The Examiner][1]
In 2013, Santa Clara County added all of 5,245 new units for over 27,600 new arrivals. Meanwhile, SF has an awful lot of construction cranes up for a city that refuses to allow anything to ever be built.
1 Like
Those cranes, for the most part, aren’t building housing and the ones that do aren’t meeting with demand. Everything takes years to get approval and it is often very very difficult to build anything.
I live in the Bay Area but I live in Oakland for a reason.
1 Like
Some of us were doing it long before this thread. I buy from two bookstores in town, Strand and Books of Wonder on 18th Street. The latter charges full price for every book and rarely has sales. I would prefer to be able to browse there and come across ten new writers I’ve never heard of and get fantastic recommendations from the staff than line Bezos’s pockets with one thin dime.
I haven’t Amazoned for a book in four or five years and I do not miss it.
Depends on the bookbuyer for the most part. Some people buy a book a year around the holidays and never anything else. Other people spend hours browsing and rummaging through the stacks and love having someone they can say “It’s about this guy who, it’s science fiction, and there’s someone who tries to kill him at the beginning and he goes on all these adventures and meets his dad and is a time traveller?” only to hear “Sounds like Heinlein’s The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.”
The latter are the ones this bookstore needs to appeal to. But comfy chairs take up needed shelf space, so making it comfy starts to get to be a stretch.
1 Like
Not really. I’d argue that Amazon is a main player in the rush to the bottom because they have a 20 year goal to drive the cost lower, lower than is even profitable, in order to gain more marketshare. Once they are the company store they’ll have no issues finding a profit. Yes, smaller bookstores are closing, but Powell’s and Strand are only two ships in the mighty Amazon Sea. There are plenty of small town bookstores not near New York or Portland who can’t handle paying the rent on a physical place because Amazon dropped the bottom out on book costs.
I don’t like how they treat workers. I don’t like how they are so open about their plans. And I don’t like how they’re willing to be the next Wal-Mart to push suppliers around because they can.
That only works if you want physical books. I’m done filling my house with paper
2 Likes
Not I. My kids want to see the pictures in the books, big bright colorful ones, by Floca or Willems or Jeffers, and I’m right there with them. Art books on an e-device are, well, they’re not for me.
2 Likes
Everybody who ran for City Council in Mountain View this year talked about the need to add more housing, not just business. There’s been a fair bit of housing construction going on, considering that most of the land on the west side of 101 is already built up (so housing construction requires knocking down existing houses or businesses), the land that isn’t built is mostly right near the freeway (and they’re building new condos and apartments there anyway, in spite of the unlivably loud noise level), and the east side of the freeway is Bay fill, ecologically sensitive land that’s got offices on it.
I’m new to the Bay Area, but I’m definitely going to try to make it by Borderlands before the doors close. I’m sad the owners will need to close the store, but I wonder if they have plans or thoughts to either expand the cafe (like SF needs another coffee shop) or develop a different business in their location. It seems like the thing to do when one market dies is look for another to grow and develop. Although the the market for physical retail stores is challenged, perhaps there are different things of interest to their customer base and neighborhood which would be useful.
1 Like
