Epistemographer

Slashdot just published an interview with Neal Stephenson, pretty much all of which is must-reading. Check out the whole thing, but one quote that particularly jumped out at me is his observation on bookstores, which seems to encapsulate many of my conclusions about video stores into a few lines:

There was a time maybe five years ago when many people were questioning whether brick-and-mortar bookstores were going to survive the onslaught of online retailers. Now, if you take the narrow view that a bookstore is nothing more than a machine that swaps money for books, then it follows that there’s no need for a physical store. But here we are five years later. Some bookstores have gone out of business, it’s true. But there are big, beautiful bookstores all over the place, with sofas and coffee bars and author appearances and so on. Why? Because it turns out that a bookstore is a lot more than a machine that swaps money for books.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 20th, 2004 at 11:03 pm and is filed under General Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.