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With the winter holidays right around the corner, I’m thinking about how much I object to huge chain stores. I’m lucky to live in Boston, a city that has historically enjoyed a surplus of bookstores, many of them general interest and many of them aimed at specific niches, such as black writers, children’s books, leftist books and so on. Slowly but surely, though, the independent bookstores have succumbed to online sites that can beat them on price and convenience. But there’s no browsing. There’s no serendipitous discovery of a wonderful book you’d never expected to read. Many of my favorite books were discovered this way, including Red-Tails in Love, Fermat’s Enigma and A Pattern Language.

So I’ve made it a point never to shop on Amazon.com. I saw a chart this morning that indicated which online stores received the most hits on the first Big Holiday Shopping Day of 2009 (Nov. 27): Amazon was No. 1, followed by Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sears, JC Penney, ToysRUs, Kohl’s, Kmart and Dell.

All I can say is this: if you live near independent stores of any kind — books, hardware, pharmacy — shop there.

Tags: amazon, holiday shopping, independent bookstores, walmart, winter holidays

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