Bookstores

[sharonashwood]

 I was having an interesting discussion with a friend who is also a former bookseller. We were yakking about book-buying sprees with all the gleeful shame of unrepentant addicts, comparing finds and hauls. Out of all this evolved the discussion of what feels “right” about a bookstore--that is, the qualities of the physical store itself.

It was a

Comments

[sj_day]

I love BIG bookstores, the more floors the better. They are like heaven to me. I want comfy seating areas with overstuffed furniture, preferably set up in conversational groupings rather than private nooks. I really love it when they have coffee shops, not just for the convenience but also for the added aroma.

I do love small bookstores, too, but I don't feel as if I could spend years in them like I do at a megastore. They feel finite to me.

[zhyegoatt]

I don't think it's the bookstore set up that matters to me. It's the people working there that make me feel welcome or not. When they see you looking at a book do they say, "I just loved that book." or when you ask about an author's new book do they look at like you're nuts and ask you to repeat the name?

I buy next to nothing at the Walden's now Borders store here because they don't have anyone working for them that knows anything about the fantasy or sci-fi sections at all. I don't have to feel like the only freak into urban fantasy around here, I can just stay home and buy it off of Amazon.

[casaubon]

It depends.
If I know what I want, I prefer a big place with plenty of stock.
The best place for random browsing is a second hand bookshop with narrow aisles and shelves stacked higgledy-piggledy with all manner of old books. I could spend hours in one of those - I don't need to sit when I'm browsing.

And I don't like coffee, to taste or smell, so a coffee shop's wasted on me. :)

[janni518]

I prefer to do my browser without commentary, so big and sprawling is good for me. Much as I like the idea of the little corner bookstore they almost always come with overly helpful staff. I prefer the anonymity pf a larger place. I would love a huge Hogwarts type place if one existed.

[dpeterfreund]

I really don't care what a store looks like as long as it has books in it.

What will turn me off to a bookstore, however, is the attitude. (Like what Zhye said.) The bookstore nearest my house has a TERRIBLE attitude. The romance novels are not shelved in any order I can discern, and once, when I was trying to find a new release they said was on the floor, the clerk goes, "Just take another -- they're all the same."

Another time, I was in their terrible, terrible YA section, and watched a bunch of clerks ridicule an adult for shopping in the section (she was a school librarian), then speak to me as if I was somehow mentally impaired because I, too, was looking in that section. They explained everything to me very loudly, very slowly, and using very small words, that there were two parts to the YA section -- fantasy (point) and realism (point). Oh, I said, pointing to the realism section, "Then why is A GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEAUTY, FEED, and TWILIGHT here?"

Idiots.

[sharonashwood]

Or, the typical response from the YA section in our chain store, "if we don't have it, it's not there." Full stop. Or, "We've sent that back already." Full stop. And they question why sales are down? I was asking about the Morganville series ....

[shistavanenjedi]

That's silly - what if you're buying a book as a birthday/x-mas present for a child? Also, though it annoys me alot, in UK book stores, we tend to get Harry Potter, Eragon and Phillip Pullman books being shelved in the adult's Fantasy/Sci-Fi section just because the books have been made into films when the space taken up by them could be used for authors like Mike Stackpole and Timothy Zahn, whose books are hard to find over here (unless its the Star Wars titles that they've written.)

[jackiekessler]

With more and more indies, sadly, closing their doors, I'm finding the chain experience to be the norm. Some local chain stores are more comfy than others; some staff are more knowledgeable in terms of recommendations than others.

Nothing, but nothing, beats having a bookseller who knows his or her stuff.

JK