I Hate Bookstores

I’ve really come to hate bookstores.  I don’t want to buy books online because I like to peruse them a little before I fork out a hundred bucks to make sure it’s really want I want.  The back cover blurb is only accurate on the good books so you’ve got no idea whether you should trust it or not.  When I walk into a brick and mortar book store though they never have what I want.  I was in Borders this afternoon and their computer section seems to have dramatically shrunk and now has “feature shelves” where instead of being full of books they feature just two books on the shelf, most likely to cover up the fact that they don’t have enough stock to actually fill the shelves.

Considering how annoying it is to get to Borders – it’s in the city so you have to pay an arm and half a leg for parking, plus deal with all the traffic – I’m really not that inclined to keep going back considering how rarely I find what I want. I know I could order it in, but why bother doing that when I could just order it from Amazon and have it delivered directly to my door?

I really don’t think brick and mortar stores are threatened by online book stores, I think they’re threatened by the fact that they don’t have what people want often enough.  They’ll probably have the best sellers and have the benefit of instant gratification but for anything even a little bit older or less mainstream it seems to get very hit and miss, very quickly.