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Actually speaking from a bookstore selling perspective not changing is what did Borders in. Kobo is a fine device and is doing very well independent of Borders and anyone saying they aren't up to snuff with Nook or Amazon hasn't used one recently. But Kobo couldn't save what was already lost. If you look at Chapters/Indigo here in Canada who are nicely surviving where Borders fell the difference was adapting to change. A few years ago almost all of the movies/dvds went out of the stores in favor of selling them online, they still have a few but just stuff they know will sell in quantity. What they did instead was redesign their stores to give prominent locations to their gift/toy/kids merchandise and also upgrade the quality of the merchandise they sell in there to make them a higher end retailer for those goods. As for selling textbooks or increasing non fiction what people don't understand with that is the incredibly thin margins on books. Sure you might sell a few textbooks but the margin on them is less than 5% and they only sell once a quarter or semester whereas changing over to a bestseller you can sell 5000 copies in a few weeks and then move the rest to backstock and still make money off them in the long run. The numbers game unbelievably favors being fiction and easy reading material heavy even if you are close to a university or any other structure.
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