I Fought the Law

Meh, there are still a few more booksellers in Berkeley, including:

On Bancroft -
Cal Student Store
Ned's
University Press

I forgot a few others, but the Daily Cal listed a bunch of them about a year ago:

www.dailycal.org/sharticle.php?id=20904

There are also several other B&Ns in the cities surrounding Berkeley, including Albany, Oakland, and Orinda. I think there are more than a few Borders around here as well.

Yeah, but with all of the recent closures, I've got to think there are three elements at work here:
1) Internet business kills local retailers here.
2) The City of Berkeley buries businesses, particularly chains, in taxes in bureaucracy.
3) The area around campus just isn't a natural commercial area. It isn't a place that is convenient to get to - it is a good few miles from any freeway, hardly visible from those major throughways, parking is a bitch, the streets can't handle that high of traffic, and so on.

Then again, the market could just be oversaturated.

there's a half-price books on shattuck by the bart station. it's excellent AND relatively cheap. i like it much more than the HPB in concord that i used to work at.

Ah yes, I forgot the student store. That's a solid bookstore, that is. Do Ned's and UP carry a general stock of books?

There's also, somewhat more fringe-ly, The Other Change Of Hobbitt (right next door to HPB) and Analog Books on Euclid. And Shakespeare and Co. on Telegraph. And Dark Carnival on Claremont, and Mrs. Dalloway's on College, although those aren't that close to campus. And I feel sure there's another little bookstore on Shattuck north of Hearst somewhere, which probably, like half of this list, buys and sells used books.

A lot of stuff has been closing in Berkeley in the last year. Shattuck in particular seems to have trouble keeping retail space filled. Ben seems to have a pretty good set of hypotheses for why, but there's also the fact that renting a storefront the size of Barnes and Noble in Berkeley is so expensive that you need to be making truly fat dollahs to stay in business. Speaking of which, does anyone but me remember when the enormous Long's on Shattuck was something other than Long's? And what was it?

Dianna: I think the place north of Hearst on Shattuck is Black Oak Books, next to Saul's Deli and across the street from the Safeway. If it's still there, that is. I remember they had a pretty nice selection, but tended toward expensive vintage books rather than cheap old paperbacks.

Just for the record, I didn't mean to suggest that Pegasus and Moe's were the only bookstores left in Berkeley. Just the two "major" ones, a term which is defined somewhat arbitrarily by me. I recognize that there are a pantload of quirky bookstores in the city, as there should be.

Longs on Shattuck used to be Bill's Drugs.