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Let's face it, folks. While they won't completely go away, bookstores are basically doomed.
A small bookstore may hold 10,000 to 20,000 titles; a superstore might have 50,000. In contrast, an ebook retailer who boasted of 50k titles would get laughed at for its paltry offerings. Most of those books sell in small numbers and occupy expensive real estate. Unless it's a specialty store (e.g. mysteries, art books, antiquarian books etc), physical stores can't compete with big stores on availability, price or convenience.
Keeping a physical store around so people can merely browse, and then buy online, is not going to work. It's expensive, inconvenient, and can't possibly offer enough titles to make the project worthwhile. There's also no viable way to ensure that people will even buy the ebooks you're hawking through them; what would stop a Sony user from browsing at the B&N store, and then buying the ebook from Sony?
Selling digital works on a physical media also isn't going to work. All you'd do is replicate the inefficiencies of the paper versions onto ebooks, and increase the costs. You'd also be creating yet more e-waste, which is one of the last things the world needs.
Bookstores are likely to go the way of record stores -- clean off the map, except for a small presence in big box stores, and specialty stores in urban areas. All the nostalgia in the world won't save them.
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