The demise of the second-hand bookshop
Used bookstores are a lot like gardens -- they must be tended daily and grown in 100 ways, year after year. The city I grew up in was legendary for used bookstores, and they sit all but empty now, decades later. The 'modern' people chiming in about how to "search faster" are missing an aspect of the experience that is literal and measureable, as well as partially undefineable simply because the portion of the mind and senses that is exercised is non-linear -- file that under "non-linear thinking"<p>I have a Powells bookstore bookbag, and know others that do, too. Bookstores were a destination across counties or states.  The loss of these local bookstores has 1000 unintended consequences.  People see the absence the same way they see the absence of a blooming meadow where there is now only pavement and some litter -- in other words, not at all.<p>I am literally disheartened by the loss of local bookstores, in any size town.