So the trick is selling good books they think the readers might actually want to read, rather than accepting money from publishers to hawk subpar « bestsellers » that the corporate overlords have decided should sell ? Amazing ! Who would have thought it ? /s

Something I have noticed here in France is that the bookshops that are successful are the big independent bookshops like Gibert Joseph in the Quartier Latin in Paris. They tend to be huge, with a lot of nooks and crannies full of books on various esoteric subjects. They can give Amazon a run for their money when it come to the variety and availability of the books they sell, and there is always a great atmosphere in these bookshops. They are paradises for bookworms. Even as someone who almost always read on my Kindle now and buy ebooks on Amazon, this is still the kind of places I love to go to and buy books from. And I am not the only one : Gibert Joseph is not only thriving, but also opening subsidiary bookshops in other big towns of France. By contrast, FNAC, the main chain bookstore in France, switched over the years from mostly selling books to mostly selling electronic devices, and only survived the pandemic thanks to a loan from the government.