The impending death of the used bookseller
by remnil
provocative article on Entrepreneur.com recently profiled several industries on the verge of extinction. Among the condemned: record stores, newspapers, and used bookstores.
As the article notes, newspapers aren't really going to die; they're just going to change. But what about those book and record stores? It would perhaps be more accurate to say that and record stores are under threat. Sure, a few widely successful independents will remain. But even iconic independents are finding it harder to stay open.
What do you think? Are independent book and record stores disappearing? Should we even care, in the age of the long tail thrift and accessibility of Amazon and Barnes & Noble? Or will such stores simply adapt like their allegedly-doomed newspaper brethren?
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I remember coming home from
I remember coming home from my first month of college. I went to downtown Plymouth and looked for my favourite record store. It had recently moved so I went to the new, discrete location. It wasn't there. I looked through the window and the store was empty. It started to rain. Desperate to browse through records and not actually buy anything, I started to run to its old location by the Penn Theatre. As I rounded the corner at Main Street, though, I saw to my horror, where my music store once stood, a Jimmy Johns. I've haven't eaten on of their sandwiches since. No joke.