As well as know, book stores are dying a slow death. And one of the groups that bemoans this fact are the denizens of academia. College students, instructors and the like are the ones that are killing off the book store. I suppose the question is how, but it's rather simple.
College students read a lot and have to buy books for classes. But because they're students they do not have limitless resources to spend upon books. So options like Amazon and eBay and used book sources are better alternatives. With a reduced revenue stream, book stores are forced to look at other methods of bringing in business. So they cater to the more casual forms of literature. Cookbooks, self-help, pop culture biographies and then main stream garbage like Fifty Shades of Grey.
As students like to think that they want to support book stores, they head out to these stores every now and again and find the book stores loaded with cookbooks, self-help, pop culture biographies and Fifty fucking Shades of Shit. It then creates this circle that gets tighter and tighter and literature of merit are less in demand. For example, at a recent visit to the book store, the Shakespeare section was one case and then the Romance section had six cases. Granted, there are far more Romance novels than works by Shakespeare (even counting Cliff Notes about his plays, sonnets and things and stuff). But still.
I mean, what's the appeal of Romance novels? Why can't people just watch porno? And why do people look down their nose at porno, but people don't look down at Romance novels. I mean, hypocrisy of the highest order here. We're all sexual beings, I don't judge how people like to get their rocks off, yet, c'mon. Porno is more believable than Romance novels too. Porn really dropped all the pretenses now and Romance novels have continued to be filled with crappy nonsense. These mystical meetings of people and all that yakkity yak.
In any event, this cycle has created the death of book stores and the evolution of buying books. Things are cheaper, more accessible and we have a better selection. Moreover, we have electronic texts and dodads to read them on. So in short, we miss what book stores were and not what they are and when they finally die we'll all be better off.
