Technical book store in GTA?

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/27/05, Paul Mora <paulmora-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 5/26/05, Erebus <erebus-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > And there used to be a chain called "Canada Computer Books" that had stores
> > in Waterloo, Mississauga and Toronto. But then they vanished too. I bought
> > quite a few books in their store (and always thought it was the kind of
> > store I would love to own some day).
> 
> Yeah, I loved going to Toronto Computer Books on Yonge St. north of
> College.  I bought a ton of stuff from them, everything from the
> Yggdrasil (sp) Linux distro to OReilly books.  They always had a great
> Linux/Unix section, and the old computers they had on the shelf above
> the books were cool to look at.
> 
> A store like that would be "fun" to run, but ultimately it doesn't
> make a whole lot of money.

It's worth keeping in mind that most of the "putatively technical"
stores around are in fact nothing of the sort.

The normal point of a retail store is to put things on shelves and
then have customers take those things and buy them.  (There's an
aspect of "duh!" to this...)

The "things" may be computers or technical books, but that does not
change the point of the exercise from being a *retail* exercise, where
things that distract the staff from putting new boxes on the shelves
or from processing your sales order are, in fact, irrelevant
distractions.

This is pretty obvious with Future Shop/Best Buy; the presence of the
"nontechnical" departments selling vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, and
stereo speakers makes it much clearer that they are not there to sell
you computers, but rather to sell you "boxes" containing "stuff."

There is danger in assuming that other sorts of stores are materially
different, that they really ARE there to be computer experts, or that
there is commercial value to being a book enthusiast at a bookstore
except in the role of customer.
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