I’ve only visited Halifax once, around 2002 I believe, which is when I picked up my Citadel bookmark. I also visited The Book Room, which at the time was Canada’s oldest bookstore and (per Wikipedia) the largest non-chain bookstore in Eastern Canada. Some of its history is provided on the back of this bookmark. It closed in 2008 at the ripe old age of 169, a victim of people starting to buying books online and the practice of dual pricing (a recurring problem when currencies fluctuate and books become a lot more expensive in Canada than the U.S.).
With regard to people making their purchases online, the CBC story on the closing of The Book Room included this depressing little anecdote:
“The market reality is really changing,” said owner Charles Burchell, who described how a book was delivered to his store by mistake around Christmas time. The Book Room sits on the bottom of an apartment building; an online order was made by a tenant upstairs.
“The book was on our shelf, so they could have come down in two minutes and picked the book up, but they chose to order by computer and wait five [to] seven days for it to come in,” Burchell told CBC Radio.
That’s grim, and the sort of shift that a lot of retailers, not just of books, were having to deal with around the same time.
Book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta
Alex Good 
That statement by the bookstore owner totally ignores the price difference. Most people aren’t on tenterhooks to get their next read, so 5-7 days isn’t a big deal compared to 5 to 7 dollars.
But 169 years is a good long run!
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Yeah, the reason Amazon put everyone out of business was because they were offering big discounts. They don’t do that as much now. Indeed hardly at all. But we all knew that was going to happen.
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No they don’t at all. Makes me wonder how long they’ll last. Sears lasted several generations, as did places like K-Mart, etc. But they all eventually fell and so one day will amazon.
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I’m not so sure. I can see all of the other tech giants falling, but Amazon’s supply chain and logistics are now so developed, they’ve basically won online retail. Still amazes me you can order stuff and have it delivered the same day. Nobody else, aside from local retailers, can do that.
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And if they stay at that level, then sure, you might have a point. But my point is that companies suffer rot from within and without and always fall.
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Well in the long run we’re all dead, civilization will collapse, and the universe will fade into nothingness. I wouldn’t buy stock in Amazon now because I think they’ve grown as much as they can. But they’ll probably be around for a long time.
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And I won’t disagree with that last sentence at all. I just don’t think they are perpetual, as some people seem wont to make them out to be….
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Is it more enjoyable to read a book in Canada than the US ie is it worth the extra money?
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Everything is more enjoyable in Canada. Come over and give it a try. You’ll see.
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