4 ms·
One of the great thing about the physical sites of used-book stores, which I've never seen replicated in an online store, is their ability to surface books you'
by vonnik 4y ago
One of the great thing about the physical sites of used-book stores, which I've never seen replicated in an online store, is their ability to surface books you'd never know to look for. It's not just curation, but the accumulation of curation over many years, and the willingness to leave interesting books on the shelves to wait for the right reader.
Great second-hand book stores are riddled with wormholes into past civilizations and cultures, maybe just a few decades old, that no one ever bothered to name or remember, outside the wormhole of the book. So I guess they make the past more discoverable. And by discovering those lost cultures we can understand the trajectory of our culture, its effervescence and loose ends and lost causes. Which is great for understanding our own time.
Rant: American culture seems fascinated with time travel and alien intelligence, as though they were things just out of reach, when in fact, we're surrounded with time travel and alien intelligence that we manage to ignore. The books are the time travel. The ravens/dolphins/dogs/elephants are the alien intelligence.
- ryanobjc 4y agoIt’s really interesting - we’ve seemingly given up on curation and discovery on the internet. There’s just too much spam and scam to really make it work. Take your average recipe website: it includes multiple paragraphs of irrelevant “background story” to delay you seeing the recipe for more ad views. Whereas books and libraries have none of that cruft. If you want to learn something the library (or bookstore) is a much better place - the books don’t come with dynamic ads and affiliate links to encourage you to buy something.
- elliekelly 4y agoIt’s not just with books, either. I think the deliberate inefficiency is a selling point for a lot of brick & mortar stores now. In second hand stores and stores like Home Goods or Five Below you have to sift through a bunch of disorganized crap to maybe find something you didn’t even know you wanted. It’s like loot box shopping, I guess.
- dangus 4y agoI'd just caution being too quick on equating "the Internet" to the sub-section of the Internet consisting of "ad-supported search engines taking you to blog content." The Internet is much bigger than google.com, and there are a lot of ways to use it outside of that experience.