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Am I the only one who thinks the "internet will never replace bookstores" people were right in a way
Everyone in this group loves to dunk on that 1998 quote about the web being a fad, but I sat in a Borders in Columbus in 2007 and watched a guy on a kiosk order a book they didn't stock, and that model still beats waiting 3 days for a warehouse to ship. Not saying the tech was wrong, just that the smug "we told you so" posts skip how the actual in-store experience got worse, not better. Which pre-2010 prediction do you think the crowd gets wrong in the other direction?
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joelsanchez3d ago
My buddy Dave drove 40 minutes to a Barnes and Noble in 2009 to grab a book for a class, and they pointed him to a kiosk too, then told him it'd arrive in a week while he stood there looking at a shelf full of stuff he didn't need. The part people miss is that the store used to be the thing that had it, and now it's just a showroom for a website. The 2010 crowd guessed the tech right but bet the whole store experience would get better to match, and it mostly just got smaller.
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