Quote:
Originally Posted by faithbw
This has probably hurt bookstores more than anything. It's not the Kindle itself that is hurting bookstores but the fact that you can get cheaper books at places like Amazon, Half.com, etc. People just aren't getting books from bookstores. They like the experience of the bookstore but not buying books from bookstores. E-Books are just helping to speed up the process.
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The internet is killing the bookstore. Physical stores have limited space, which means limited titles. OR I can go to Amazon and order absolutely anything, and usually cheaper. When bookstores started to lose money, they began subsidizing their book sales with miscellaneous junk: trinkets, dvds, cds, cups of coffee... and that may be fine for the average person, but that drove me to Amazon even more because all those other things meant even
less room for books. (And why on earth did they start carrying dvds and cds when everything was going digital???)
I essentially stopped shopping locally when I could never find the book I wanted (as 'local' as B&N and Borders can be considered...). I typically only buy two types of books in paper format: crafty books (knit, crochet, etc) and cookbooks. It's much faster to get these books from my library or Amazon than to special order them from Borders or B&N.
Bookstores need to find a way to 1. carry the titles I want and 2. give me access to ebooks. I can imagine a store that has 1-2 copies of, say, one million different books. Let people browse the physical books, then let them purchase the ebook right there. Maybe it's as simple as scanning the book somewhere and telling the computer to send
this book to
that device. Of course, in order to make this truly effective, DRM will have to fall by the wayside at some point... otherwise bookstore survival will become all about the device rather than the book.