Tomasino talks about buying books [0]. I had to login to my old
Amazon account which has order history back to 1997. As I recall,
Amazon was selling just books back then, and my order history shows
that (the first thing I bought that year was 'The Forever War' by
Joe Haldeman). I remember that it seemed amazing at the time to be
able to order almost any book at a discount - even including
shipping costs it was cheaper than the big bookstores.
My how times have changed. For me at least, Amazon is a "hold your
nose and buy this thing you can't get anywhere else" kind of store
now. They play games with pricing and reviews, often they are no
longer the cheapest alternative. Not to mention how they treat their
employees.
Like Tomasino, I don't buy many physical books anymore, but when I
do I opt for the online used stores like Thriftbooks (Abebooks was
bought by Amazon years ago, so that is out) and I also use Amazon
for the reviews. For ebooks I have a Kobo, so I use their online
store or get ebooks from the library in Montreal. I manage things
with Libby and Calibre, with the Calibre plugin to strip DRM from my
Kobo purchases.
I do miss browsing brick & mortar used book stores, where we live
now there aren't any to speak of. One of my favorite used bookstores
in the States was 'Raven Used Books' in Northampton, Massachusetts
[1]. I could browse there for hours. If you look at the pics linked
from their website (instagram warning), you can see the glorious
wall-to-wall, sagging shelves with books overflowing onto the floor
in haphazard piles. It smells just as you would imagine, of dust and
old paper.
[0]:
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20220306-buying-books
[1]:
https://ravenusedbooks.com/
