When I was in Seattle a couple of weeks back I stopped into the Elliot Bay Book Company after breakfast with one friend and coffee with another. It's a great book store. It doesn't have the depth of Powell's in Portland, but it's great nonetheless.
I went to the business/finance section because I was looking for a specific book for a client (Morgan Housel's The Psychology of Money). As with your typical book store, this section is hidden away in the back, not unlike the pornography section in magazine stores of yore. When I got there there was a big dad with his 10-11 year old sun. The dad pointed to a Tony Robbins book he apparently had or swore by, while the son seemed puzzled by the whole concept of a book store. The dad explained that, unlike libraries, in book stores one purchased books to keep them rather than borrowed them.
Apparently the boy had never been to a book store before, which is a sad state of affairs but not all that surprising, nearly a quarter of a century after Jeff Bezos took aim at the category. Thankfully, physical stores haven't gone away entirely, but clearly they are now luxury goods and we are lucky to live in a place where we have one.
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