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I find the reviews on Amazon to be far more helpful. Besides, just today I was reading HN and saw a reference to a book. I popped over to Amazon and bought a c
by skookumchuck 9y ago
I find the reviews on Amazon to be far more helpful.
Besides, just today I was reading HN and saw a reference to a book. I popped over to Amazon and bought a copy. I never would have heard of the book by any bookstore proprietor (and it was published in the days before those bookstores vanished).
Amazon has hardly eliminated serendipity.
- bamboozled 9y agoEveryone reading only the perceived best will have a strange affect on society over time. “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -- Haruki Murakami
- mseebach 9y agoThere's no way Amazon isn't going to make that particular situation better, not worse. The vast majority of the bookstores of yore stocked a few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, titles, and those were necessarily the ones "everyone" was reading. Today everyone (not just those near a well-stocked bookstore with a good librarian) can browse and order from literally millions of titles. The (relatively few) people who used to have a well stocked bookstore with a good librarian nearby are probably a bit worse off under Amazon. Everyone else is a lot better off.
- mc32 9y agoI'd would disagree with that quip. Not everyone interprets things the same way. Two examples, religious texts and the corpus of laws.
- taeric 9y agoI always find it interesting to read quotes like that. The point is to read everything. But, why a famous author for the quote? This one, in particular, would be a lot more powerful from a librarian.
- bamboozled 9y agoI just didn't want to pretend it was my quote.
- taeric 9y agoAbsolutely fair.