The Power of Serendipity

Bookstore and libraries, like cities, are about serendipity if they are about anything at all.

Stuart Buck wonders here if Amazon's new full-text search will be able to offer the sort of serendipity which a 3-D library offers and which makes for fruitful research:

Yet I'm worried about one small thing: The value of serendipity. I've found -- and I'm sure I'm not alone -- that some of the best and most useful books that I've ever found are ones that I wasn't looking for in particular, and that didn't turn up on a computer search. When I head into the library with a list of the books that turned up on a computer search, I often realize that the computer turned up books that were not what I was looking for. Instead, some of the most useful books end up being those on the surrounding shelves. And I never would have found them unless I took the trouble to stand in front of a physical shelf of books all afternoon and flip through one or two hundred books on the general topic.

There's a point there. The most useful, interesting, important books are also generally capable of being shelved in more than one location. So it's useful to be able to accidentally bump into them. Of course perhaps the blogosphere acts to help us bump into things we'd typically not see.