I miss hanging out at bookstores, with comfortable seating areas and coffee shops and maybe a quiet musician on weekends... met some really smart and educated people that way.

I recently wandered into an old Borders like that where I used to spend a lot of time years ago, which is now a Books-a-Million. It was like being in a K-Mart. Dirty, dimly-lit, product stacked randomly everywhere (including just left on stocking carts abandoned in the aisles), hot because they had the A/C set to barely run at all (everyone inside was sweating), all seating gone, the kitchen area just ripped out and bare plumbing left exposed, with hardly any staff or customers in there at all. The book selection was gutted down to be mostly romance, horror, manga and self-help. I guess that's what the few people still coming in buy.

It was pretty depressing.