
At Amazon’s Bookstore, No Coffee but All the Data You Can Drink - hecubus
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/at-amazons-bookstore-no-coffee-but-all-the-data-you-can-drink.html
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ensiferum
I feel like in the future there will be a few mega corps that will provide
everything you need in your life through a subscription model. Any small
players can't enter the market since they don't have neither the money nor the
user base to gain any significant traction and if they somehow managed to get
traction they'd be squeezed out of the existence (or purchased and then put
out of competition) by the mega corps.

Next you'll be tagged with a microchip and every action you do, every item you
purchase, every location you visit will be tracked and used to push you more
"specialized" and individualized content and adverts from the said mega corps.

Regarding the books, since the amazon book store is only selling books that
people read and if there are nothing but amazon book stores, people can only
buy (and read) the books that they sell, which means that a book that they
don't sell can't be read, which means it won't be sold and thus cannot be read
etc.

These days I'm buying as much as I can from places other than Amazon.

~~~
hbosch
Why stop there? Mega-corps will eventually supersede governments. When Amazon,
Google, and Apple all have 10.000.000 employees, then "Waymo v. Uber" isn't
just law it's a wartime skirmish! Employment will be more valuable than
citizenship. Would make a nice dystopia.

~~~
amelius
Interesting, but what would happen if companies start to print their own
money?

~~~
csours
If? Video games currently have in-game currency, for which they employ real
economists.

MANY companies allow you to fund a wallet of one kind or another for internal
transactions.

It's also happened in the past:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store)

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skookumchuck
> no obvious signs of corporate guilt at having driven countless independent
> bookstores to oblivion

I spent decades browsing bookstores with their paltry inventory of
bestsellers, occasionally resorting to ordering a book through them. I like
Amazon a lot better (and the prices are far better, too). I buy a ton of books
from Amazon.

I don't miss the bookstores.

~~~
Mark222
I never understood why people were mourning bookstores while libraries seem
such a better thing anyway.

~~~
Eridrus
In my experience the books I wanted to read we're often already on loan to
someone and I would have to wait for them to be returned or for them to get
the book from another branch. It was particularly bad with series.

I was pretty excited by the fact that I could buy my own books when I got my
first job. I still miss Borders.

~~~
jloughry
Borders was amazing: they even carried _conference proceedings_.

Never seen that anywhere else.

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Turing_Machine
> no obvious signs of corporate guilt at having driven countless independent
> bookstores to oblivion

Hmm... at one time, New York City had probably a couple of dozen full-featured
daily newspapers. Does the New York Times have any "obvious signs of corporate
guilt" about having driven those to oblivion?

~~~
danso
It's doubtful the NYT would have been the main player in those newspapers'
downfalls. The NYT has almost always been seen as having weak local coverage
compared to papers like the Daily News and the Post.

~~~
RugnirViking
But surely in the same way amazon is less specialized in local language books
or smaller scale books written by local people than a bookstore. The same
still applies

~~~
alphakappa
That analogy doesn’t really hold. In the US, the local language is pretty much
just english, and I’d be surprised if there was a trend of people in Chicago
going to bookstores to buy books written by locals. Not to mention that Amazon
is not really weak when it comes to books written by anyone, local or
otherwise. They are all likely to be available on Amazon.

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robotmay
In the UK we almost lost our largest remaining bookstore chain, however
they've performed a pretty miraculous turnaround. I'm sure I read a better
article in the past than this:
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-
the-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/balancing-the-books-
how-waterstones-returned-to-profit), but I can't remember where it was.
Essentially it boiled down to the new CEO ditching a lot of existing
agreements and systems like the bestsellers lists, and instead giving most of
the control of stock to the local stores, so each store is now more likely to
stock books relevant to the local area.

I've been in a number of their stores over the past year and each one has felt
rather different, and I discovered quite a few interesting books I otherwise
would never have come across. I hope they continue to be a viable business.

On another note, I've experienced progressively worse delivery and customer
service from Amazon over the past two years, causing me to cancel my Prime
subscription (which I had from launch) and to stop ordering from them
altogether. They need to ditch their crap courier service in the UK.

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RangerScience
I want a discovery service that shows me the things "most different (but also
quality)" from the things I've already seen. It seems like this should be
doable.

~~~
nl
That's trivial to do without using any machine learning.

Go to Goodreads/Librarything, choose a subject/genre you never read and choose
the 6th highest rated book (to avoid spam/flash popularity problems)

Personally I'm pretty doubtful this method will give you something you
actually want to read though.

~~~
r3bl
> Personally I'm pretty doubtful this method will give you something you
> actually want to read though.

I've read about 20 books per year for the last three years. I buy most of them
through Amazon and always mark them as read on Goodreads in order to get
better recommendations.

And yet, I can't remember a single book that I have read exclusively based on
showing up as recommended on Goodreads/Amazon. It's usually a word of mouth,
some researching, and a couple of classics I've never gotten around to from
time to time (currently finishing Fahrenheit 451 for example).

At best, the recommendations end up on my to-read list, usually forgotten, and
disappear from there too when I do a cleaning of my to-read list because it
got cluttered.

~~~
syvolt
In contrast to your experience, I've read over 150 books in the past 2 years
and around 50 of them have come from Goodreads/Amazon recommendations.

I assume it depends on the genres, especially with something like Goodreads. I
mainly only read a single genre so it must be fairly easy for them to
recommend me books.

~~~
r3bl
Yup, I tend to read a lot of genres, going from highly technical ones, to the
fiction and science fiction, all the way down to a couple of YA books when I
need something really light just to pass my time.

To make the matter even more complicated, I sometimes read books from my own
region, not translated into English (which, of course, makes them unavailable
on Amazon), so the algorithm would have to count those ones into
recommendations too.

I don't think that anyone is investing a lot of effort in solving this
gigantic problem. Amazon just wants to sell you more books, it doesn't matter
if you read them or not. I don't think that Goodreads has enough of the
capacity to make their recommendations actually work for someone as complex as
me.

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ChristianMarks
I visited the Amazon Bookstore in Columbus Circle when it opened. It was
evident that with its vast computing and data facilities, Amazon can solve
economic allocation problems with an accuracy and precision beyond the wildest
dreams of the planners of the command economy of the former Soviet Union.

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jimmywanger
> no obvious signs of corporate guilt at having driven countless independent
> bookstores to oblivion

[http://bookweb.org/for-the-record](http://bookweb.org/for-the-record)

Barnes and Noble got driven out of business because they tried to be Amazon
with store space. Right now it's hard to improve on Amazon's supply chain.

Independent bookstores that add value (carefully curated books, signing
events, an educated staff) are doing well. They just have to put effort into
it so they can make money.

This is not a case of predatory licensing, it's about adding value.
Independent bookstores that are just a crappy offline version of Amazon with
no differentiation are getting their lunches eaten, since they just don't add
any value.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> Barnes and Noble got driven out of business

The one down the road still seems to be open and not having a liquidation
sale. Maybe you're thinking of B. Dalton Bookseller or Waldenbooks?

~~~
kesselvon
He's thinking of borders

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rb808
I'm not a fan of Amazon, but for books it is unmatched. I've been in local
bookstores and checked reviews on amazon before buying in the store. I have
found a local store where its nice to ask for advice, but for computer books
especially that isn't any help.

Has anyone found good online alternatives to Amazon for books? Best I've found
is jet.com which resells B&N at a lower price subsidized by Walmart - nice,
but selection isn't huge. Abebooks is good but is owned by Amazon.

~~~
jasikpark
There's [https://thriftbooks.com](https://thriftbooks.com)

~~~
iamatworknow
I'm a big fan of [https://strandbooks.com](https://strandbooks.com)

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vikascoder
I sometime have Old timers nostalgia and think about all the video store
owners, postal staff who delivered telegrams, phone switch operators, dusty
mom and pop stores, ceiling fan companies and encyclopedia sellers who have
been put out of business by rampant corporate greed of Netflix, Gmails, Skypes
and Amazons of the new age. At least Coal Jobs are coming back. Yipee.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Greed? Consumers put those people out of business by opting for convenience
and value (at least in the short term).

No one forced people to stop shopping at a mom and pop store, but why the hell
would I when I can look up exactly what I want, research it in detail and buy
it in less time than it takes for me to get the car down the block.

~~~
kesselvon
He's being sarcastic. But no one does seem to consider how much this has
gutted local economies

