Am I really such a Bad Person?

[anghara]

I've been having an argument over on rasfc about the merits and the morality of wandering into your lcoal bookstore and, if you find your book shelved spine-out, turning it face-out for a potential buyer to see. As I pointed out somewhere in the thread, in my specific case it was my books shelved spine out next to a veritable avalanche of "

Comments

[cicadabug]

Thinking further on this:

There used to be a local bookstore with a decent SF section and an employee who knew it inside-out. I could go in and have a conversation with said employee and he could recommend books to me based on what he knew of me and my reading habits, and as a result I found a bunch of authors that I'm now very very fond of (Bujold, frex) that I may not have found otherwise, or at least not as quickly.

With the advent of giant bookstores like B&N, more often than not there's no one there that has any actual knowledge about the genre. One could look at customers changing the position of books as a usurpation of the store's right to dictate how their wares are displayed, or you can look at it as an unorganized collective method of providing peer recommendations in the absence of proper insight from the store itself. Sort of like the Encyclopedia Brittanica versus Wikipedia -- sure, if you have access to both as a source of info on a topic, you're going to go for the EB. But without EB, Wikipedia is a reasonably good alternative, all arguments about its problems/pedigree aside.

I think I would feel more reluctant to face books in a tiny store. but not in a big chain store. OTOH, in a little store I might very well say to the owner/manager, "hey, this book is really good! you ought to give it more attention", which in B&N would just make me a nutcase.