Theoretically I'd like to see bookstores survive and flourish, but in practice I won't do anything to help that happen. Like tubemonkey I'm pretty much all digital today and those few paper books I still buy I can't find in shops anyway.
Around here, likely in response to the digital age, the bookstores have all changed for the worse. A smaller selection of books, with a greater proportion being bestsellers and "light reading" and ever more gifts and pointless knick knacks cluttering the shelves and displays. The one positive change is the addition of cafès to a few of them. It doesn't make me buy any more books, but if the coffee is good I'll at least spend some money on that. And there's one that also does a mean home-made cheesecake...
Like Mr. Sharpe I actually find the slow, painful demise of the bookstore quite sad, but I think it is inevitable that it will largely be a thing of the past in two or three more decades. It will certainly linger on in a small way for very much longer than that, or even "forever", but the generation growing up today has no bias in favour of physical books (or music, or movies, or magazines, or...) and the sales of printed matter of all kinds will only continue to drop.
Quote:
Originally Posted by medard
I'm quite sure we'll always have bookstores. Most people still prefer printed books. ... Books are essential for a cultivated environment.
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I really can't see it. In my experience, most people prefer printed books because they've never tried electronic books. Once they do, again in my (limited) experience most people are almost always near-instant converts.