The big box model killed small bookstores, then demanded that to access their new market, publishers print in sufficient volumes to stock all their huge stores,

The big box model killed small bookstores, then demanded that to access their new market, publishers print in sufficient volumes to stock all their huge stores, and then when they didn't sell all of the copies, the stores returned the unsold books to the publishers and that collapsed them. The big box store killed the more sparse and diverse shops that sustained the market for niches like Nobel, Booker, and other prize winners. Litfic is mainly character driven over of plot driven, so to say it's all pretentious would be a bit much. The result was that Indigo came to resemble a kind of landfill of discarded ideas, where the good stuff got lost in the effort to find it.