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I personally like reading Science Fiction which is not the sort of book you find in a lot of retailers though Borders and Waterstones generally have a reasonable selection. What there is in London is a specialist book store that sells all sci-fi and on the odd occaisions that I get down there I usually spend several hours browsing and end up with a large credit card bill at the end.
I stopped buying paper books a while ago because I ran out of space to store the books I was buying as I generally like to re-read them a number of times there is very few I dispose of. Which is why I now have an ereader. Not the Sony as it wasn't available when I bought the Iliad. But in this context it doesn't matter.
What does frustrate me with all the online book stores is actually getting to books I might like. Whilst it is easy to jump straight to a book if you know the title or a favourite author it isn't easy to replicate the browsing experience online.
When I get chance to drop in on the specialist or any other large bookstore I spend ages looking at the books not the authors. I generally find a book cover or title will catch my interest and I'll pick it up to read the synopsis and/or dip into a few pages to see if it is something I might like. Not something that is easy to do online. I was looking on the Mobipocket site last night for example and it became painful when it displays 10 books per page and wanting to browse through only 3500 essentially became impossible.
What it means is that I now tend to stick to the authors I know which is a pity because browsing the bookstore what what made them my favourite authors in the first place.
So I agree with the people that are suggesting it would be a good idea for bookstores to be able to sell both how ever it is done. I'd be happy to 'reward' the retailer by buying the electronic version when I'd browsed the paper version even with a small premium as I feel I'd waste less money on books I found I didn't like but couldn't checkout because they were on the web.
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