The Elliott Bay Book Company, my favorite independent book store in Seattle, and one of the best bookstores on the West Coast, has all but moved from their Pioneer Square home in the historic Globe Building to Capitol Hill, according to the Seattle Times. Noteworthy in the article is the fact that the bookstore has apparently been financed by the owner's line of credit for the last few years.
When I visit -- maybe six times a year -- I almost always buy a book, even though that purchase is pretty much guaranteed to be more expensive than it would be back home @PFB. Elliott Bay's astounding selection helps me find things that I couldn't have found any other way, and that service -- exposing me to books that I might otherwise never have seen; "curating" the stock so I don't have to wade through endless shelves of NASCAR books, entertainment biographies, communicate-with-your-dead-pet books & etc., is worth paying for.
Last time I was in EBBC, I walked behind a couple making notes of books they wanted to buy on a Blackberry, in order to buy them later, at a discount, from Amazon. Which will work just fine for them until EBBC and everything like it is gone, at which point Amazon, which is no slouch in the competition theory department, will be more than happy to jack their so-called "bargain prices" right back up to full retail.
