My first real job was in a bookstore, on the sales floor of the brand new paperback department in Brentano’s on 5th Avenue in the summer of 1962.

I loved that place; I loved that job; and I’ve always had a soft spot for bookstores. But, romanticism aside, the truth is that books are just about the single best consumer product to buy online rather than in a store. For many reasons.

First of all, there’s finding what you want. An online bookseller will be able to offer you 15 million titles or so. A bookstore will offer no more than half-a-percent of the universe (which would be 75,000 titles) and most have far fewer than that. When Amazon began, there were more like half-a-million possible titles and many super bookstores carried 20-30 percent of them (more than 100,000 titles). And even then, before the numbers had shifted so massively, Jeff Bezos saw that books were the best place to start for an internet retailer.

January 27, 2020 by Mike Shatzkin

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