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Borders! Yikes! This is hitting home. I was just there tonight, but you know, you can see how the internet spoils you. You look at their DVD database for, oh, say DJANGO, and you see order ... order ... order. Why go to the store?

As hard as it is to stomach the condescension of bookstore employees who are almost exclusively liberal, I enjoy browsing in bookstores. Stacey's, a large, beautiful independent bookstore in downtown San Francisco that I used to frequent on my lunch breaks, suddenly disappeared after 85 years. It was heartbreaking riding by on a bus for the first time in weeks and seeing the banners screaming that fixtures were for sale.

Borders is all there is left in San Francisco with easy parking (Barnes & Noble is at Fisherman's Wharf).

It still ticks me off the way libs demonize Wal-Mart, saying that it kills downtown businesses. There may be a kernel of truth in that, but Amazon.com is slowly murdering the entire retail book industry. Forget mom-and-pop stores, whole chains are going south. Any anti-corporate union-thug types boycotting it? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

I will miss Borders and their classical and jazz cd selections, I built my collections on their stuff. They are the only ones that sold SACD's that I could find. I also liked their history and math/physics book sections, you could find lots of stuff you didn't know existed.

So what is the Amazon model, do they sell direct or are they a collection of small retailers doing business from who knows where like Ebay? I never bought from Ebay because I was always afraid to give my CC# to a place like that and also wasn't sure if I would get the real thing or some knockoff. Also don't relish waiting for something I bought and paid for to come in the mail.

I always went to the Barnes & Noble out in Colma. A bit of a drive, but less of a crush than the downtown bookstores.

That said, I hate SF bookstores. I once went to City Lights to get a book by Michael Savage. They had about 10,000 books with Bill Clinton on the cover all over the store, but after looking high and low, I could not find Savage’s book. I asked for help and they lead me to the back of the store where copies of his book were closed in shelves underneath display tables.

Good old San Francisco. Big purveyors of Free Speech they are. Not!

It still ticks me off the way libs demonize Wal-Mart, saying that it kills downtown businesses. There may be a kernel of truth in that, but Amazon.com is slowly murdering the entire retail book industry. Forget mom-and-pop stores, whole chains are going south. Any anti-corporate union-thug types boycotting it? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

The glimmer of light in this may be that if Amazon kills off the two major chains then the mom and pop book stores may make a comeback and cater to the niche market that prefers sitting and reading before buying.

We have HalfPriced Book stores nearby. Good used and over stocked books at half price...and when you go back in a few weeks and it hasn't sold, it's half again as much.

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There may be a kernel of truth in that, but Amazon.com is slowly murdering the entire retail book industry. Forget mom-and-pop stores, whole chains are going south.

Not just book retailing. A while back I decided I wanted a little gizmo to measure appliance electrical consumption. A quick search found it for about $40 at Home Depot or Amazon for $22.98. Add in $17.98 for overnight shipping, and the total was just about the same as running out to HD to pick it up (cheaper when you add in sales tax). It landed on my doorstep in Massachusetts the next morning. A trace of the UPS tracking number showed it was shipped from Kentucky.

I wonder how the carbon footprints of the two possible transactions would stack up, HD being about a five mile drive.