On the great balance sheet drawn up for digital culture noting its advantages and disadvantages, one item clearly on the debit side is what it has done to the bookshop, both the new bookshop and the used. America has never been overladen with bookshops, but today they have become even more scarce. Thank you, amazon.com, which has made it possible to purchase books quickly and often at impressive discounts. But if this is true, if Amazon has truly and sensibly supplanted the traditional bookshop, why bemoan the disappearance?
The problem is, it hasn’t, not really. I do not denigrate the online efficiency of amazon.com for purchasing new books, or Abebooks.com for purchasing used ones, but acquiring books off the Internet is not the same as shopping for them in stores filled with books. Acquiring a book online is a transaction. Buying one in a bookshop, a serious bookshop, is an experience. A big difference—and one, I fervently believe, that favors the bookshop.
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