At last, someone has boiled down to a paragraph what I've always disliked about big box booksellers- all those books, yet nothing to read.

But physical books aren’t the same as real books. You can’t read Hamlet, or Bloom or Kermode for that matter, if a bookshop only has Bill Bryson, let alone discover the books coming out from Pushkin, Capuchin, Serpent’s Tail, And Other Stories, Zero, Fitzcarraldo and Persephone, or from American and European presses. One of the few advantages bookshops have over Amazon and other online retailers is the opportunity they provide to stumble across something you never knew you were looking for. Books can function as gift objects, lifestyle signifiers, thematic attributes; they can be non-book products too, word-based diversions, colour-me distractions, bucket-lists, how-tos, extensions of celebrity brands. Putting something between two covers doesn’t make it a book, and putting them on shelves doesn’t make a bookshop.