If you read the article, you’d note that if the owners lay off almost all of the paid staff and run the store themselves, they’ll be making less than they’d make at a 40-hour minimum-wage job and working a lot more than 40 hours. So it’s not like this is some greedy company exploiting workers like a Walmart. It’s a small business that’s struggling to stay afloat.
For art books, I agree. I still buy special purpose art and architecture books. That said, the next George R. R. Martin novel is not something I’m going to buy as a physical book.
What do you find are / would be the difficulties of buying digital books without using Amazon?
Here’s where we differ then. I’ll get a copy from the library or buy a copy and sell it at a used bookstore so someone else can read it as well. I just prefer to have physical copies in my hands. I think it’s from looking at screens all day I don’t want to do it in my spare time as well.
The difficulties to non-Amazon ebooks are largely selection and then price. A lot of publishers only make their ebooks available through Amazon. If not just Amazon, then it is Amazon, Google, and Apple, so not much of a real difference.
I did, and you’re right. I was speaking to the larger problem.
Serious question: aside from the obvious function of selling books, what functions does a bookstore perform, that could not be performed by a public library?
if nobody wanted to live in sanfran maybe rent prices wouldn’t be so high!
Are you suggesting that business owners - the ones who take the most risk - should pay themselves even less than minimum wage?
… and yet, from the PoV of readers, amazon’s doing a wonderful job making books accessible and affordable. That side of the coin is also important.
It’s not worth the price to me. It’s the same as WalMart, who working conditions I deplore and whose 'cheapest beats all" attitude has not helped American workers in any way.
Readers are free to look at only one side of the coin if they want. I look at both and decide that paper bills are fine with me. It means I buy fewer books than I would like but I don’t feel like I’m lining the pockets of robber barons for the ones I do own.
1 Like
You mean like Hachette?
1 Like
Or Dish Network!
I hereby propose a new Award in literature: The Irony Cross.
First presentation: to the owners of Borderlands. They certainly earned it the hard way.
The owners of the building? How many employees do you think it takes to maintain a three-story building with four apartments in it?
In a high-demand area like SF, what landlords charge for rent is not at all based on their cost of doing business, unless they’re voluntarily charging well below market rate. Suggesting that the handyman’s wage bump is a driver behind rent increases is asinine and/or disingenuous.
5 Likes
Oh, you mean a LIBRARY.
Yeah, it’s been done.
2 Likes
Maybe rent wouldn’t be so high if the market wasn’t choking itself to death with its own invisible hand.
Rent prices in San Francisco are starting to make the rent prices in London and Oxford look relatively sane even after council tax has been included!
Bingo - just came here to say the same thing. Property owners hire out all their labor to contractors until they get so big that in-house forces are more profitable. You have to be really big or foolish to get there.
Landlords biggest expense is interest on their mortgages, then maybe taxes, insurance and energy, when they don’t manage to pawn those off on the tenant.
1 Like
I thought about that, but the differentiating factor would be the food, drink and conversation. No library I’ve been in had that, but I haven’t been in that many libraries, and none in SF.
Maybe it really is impossible to have a physical bookstore these days in that city with those expenses, but I think their unique expertise has some value that, given the right conditions, could sustain them. Maybe it’s a website, or an app or a change of location or renting space within another store or a literary bar or a tabletop gaming and book emporium. Got any ideas?
1 Like
