God, Andy Ross, shut the fuck up.

Listening to the now-former owner of Cody's Books carp about the poor reading habits of young'uns makes me want to firmly put my hands around his neck.

Listen, for example, to this:

"My vision was of how Cody's on Telegraph was in the 1980s - a great intellectual bookstore," Ross said. "Anything that was intelligent, we could sell. It really worked in the '80s but it doesn't work now. Young people aren't coming in. They aren't reading the way they were. People don't have the patience to sit down with a 300-page novel or a 500-page work of history when they are used to getting information from Wikipedia."

Please. I see people around Berkeley -- and San Francisco, and many other places -- with books in their hands. Big books. Substantial books. Interesting, unique pieces with information that they may have found on Wikipedia but instead are discovering in print.

Andy, don't blame your poor business practices on the supposedly bad reading habits of a younger generation. You're misguided. You claim you lost a million dollars or more in 10 years while still in the Telegraph store. You not only closed that store, but the one in Union Square. You're telling me this all has to do with the fact that people no longer read, rather than the fact that you had a hard time keeping a head for business? Did you learn this technique from your sullen friends from across town, Black Oak Books?

Funny how your former next-door neighbor and competitor, Moe's, still seems to be alive and kicking, Andy. That's probably at least in part because Moe's "embraced the internet" (as the Chronicle puts it) long before Cody's ever even considered the possibility.