The L.A. Times [register, baby] has an article about the closing of Book City, a wonderful clutter of old volumes located up on Hollywood Boulevard.
The piece blames the changing nature of the neighborhood, and that may be a factor, but I think they're missing the real cause here. Old book shops have been in steady decline the last 20+ years in all neighborhoods everywhere. There are one or two areas, like out on the Golden Mall in Burbank, where a few stores have found cheaper rent and have congregated to create a little shopping mall of antiquarian booksellers. But apart from that kind of huddling, I don't think you can find a single neighborhood in California that doesn't have fewer of those establishments than it did in the seventies. Many now have none.
It's not geography. It's not location. It's that second-hand book stores are a dying industry. To the extent some survive, it's mostly been by becoming online merchants, selling on eBay and through services like abebooks. To do that, you don't need the overhead and expense of operating a retail store in a commercial area. You can do it out of someone's garage.
Once upon a time, I was the biggest patron of old book stores you've ever seen. I went to every one in Los Angeles and I went often. I can't tell you how much cash I spent at the Book City on Hollywood Boulevard and I also patronized their old second location over on Lankershim. But I haven't visited Book City or any such establishment in years. When I buy now, I buy online.
Yes, you lose the fun of browsing the actual books but the trade-off, which I find more than acceptable, is that you get a much wider range of choices and prices. A few weeks ago, I wanted to find a certain book and if I'd gone to Book City, it would have taken me an hour or two and I might (might!) have found one copy and it would have been priced on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. I might also have wasted the trip either because they didn't have a copy or because I didn't like the price or condition of the one they had. Searching online, it took under a minute to find 40 or 50 copies — different editions, different conditions, different prices, etc., and after a couple of clicks, one was en route to me. I feel bad about Book City closing because it once did so much for me, but I've gotta admit: I don't feel so bad about these places closing that I'll forego the ease and comfort of no longer going to old book stores.