Browsing the Shelves

 Do you miss bookstores? That is, real brick-and-mortar stores with lots of shelves and lots of books on them in all sorts of categories? I do.

Sure, I can order any book I want (practically) from Amazon...and I do. But first I have to know I want it. There's the rub. Despite the so-called "decline of print," there are literally thousands of books published every year that I may have no idea exist. Their authors do not make appearances on TV, they are not advertised on television, they don't even get reviewed (the idea of every newspaper having a weekly book review column is long gone).

That is why I miss bookstores. I used to wander through the store, browsing the shelves in the sections that interest me....and that's not just science-fiction, comics and entertainment. It includes history, politics, and science. I would frequently see a title and pull it from the shelf, read the back cover or inside flap description, sometimes read the introduction or first chapter and decide "This is interesting," and buy the book. Did I always end up enjoying it? No...but more times than not, I did. A lot of these books never made it to my "permanent collection"--but they added to my knowledge, my core of information.

There's no real way to do that in an on-line environment. Sure you can ask Amazon to show you everything in print about, say, "American history 1850-1900," but the results will be so broad as to be useless (and sometimes the algorithm interprets your request in odd ways).  And even that isn't the equivalent of browsing, any more than ordering your groceries on line is the same as going to the market, seeing a nice piece of meat and saying, "Gee, I haven't had a roast in weeks."

We need bookstores back.