Amazon sells around 300 Million printed books in a year, without factoring in Flipkart and other industry giants. That means at least 300 Million people couldn’t have known the beauty of getting pleasantly surprised in a bookstore.

You walk into a bookstore, just cause you could. If it’s an unfamiliar place you walk around the store a little and by 10 minutes you have been acquainted with what genre goes where in the store. If you’re an avid reader, you see on some shelves some books that you have read, some you’ve heard about and would like to read, but the third kind of book catches your eye, the book that you may be tangentially familiar with but aren’t familiar with, You lean in to focus on the title and pull it out to read from the blurb. You find it to your liking and would like to get to know it a little bit better. You buy that book and it becomes one of the most important books in your life in terms of the impact it had on your thinking.

might feel like I’m exaggerating a bit(which I am, it’s called dramatic flair). But the idea is evermore important today. The reason behind the factoid above was the fact that at least 300 million people didn’t harness the power of randomness.

This is not a why-you-shouldn’t-use-amazon-to-buy-books type of argument, of course I buy books from Amazon. And I don’t actually Discover all new things by visiting a bookstore. I have friends who expose me to new things all the time which is certainly more discovery than going to a bookstore. Even excluding friends, I have YouTube, Twitter, articles by people I follow online and they all contribute to discovery.

My argument is that serendipity happens when you visit a bookstore. A place which optimizes for randomness.

Sticking to amazon, here’s another factoid if you’re into kindle. You don’t own your books when you buy them on kindle. Amazon reserves the right to delete and change the content of your kindle as they like. This does not mean they exploit the terms and conditions sporadically but this leaves the door open for them to do exactly that.

I read this under the comment section of a YT video, “If buying is not owning, then pirating is not stealing.”

You go to Amazon not to find books you could read, but to buy what you already know you’re going to read(mostly). Contrast that with a physical bookstore, unless you have a Grocery list of books you want to buy(and even if you do, it doesn’t matter), more often than not, you’re gonna leave with a book that you didn’t know about before. At least that’s what happens with me, I let my natural curiosity run free in a bookstore. This is the single biggest hack to diversify what you read. I’ve discovered Molière, Boethius, Nikolay Gogol, Sophocles and countless others which I otherwise wouldn’t have. Not in a million years.

The simple Logic I’ve followed with my Point is that what you don’t know far trumps the universe of what you do know.