Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
Last time I looked, Amazon is a "Brick & Mortar" book store as well as an ebook store, assuming that by "Brick and Mortar" we mean a seller of pbooks rather than a physical place you walk into to buy books.
Perhaps we should recognize three categories of book stores; - The ones you walk into to buy physical books
- The ones you can order physical books from
- The ones you can order electronic books from
Amazon overlaps the latter two whereas, AFAIK, Fictionwise is only represented by the third. Barnes and Noble are represented by the first two. For Amazons figures to be meaningful, I think the statistics must be broken into these three separate categories rather than compared to the ambiguous term "Brick and Mortar stores". |
The term "brick and mortar" store generally means a store that has one or more physical stores that you can actually walk in to to look at their goods. So, basically your category 1.
Although, the fact that a brick and mortar retailer also has an online presence doesn't preclude them from being called a brick and mortar store. It's more the absence of a physical store (online only) that puts a retailer out of the brick and mortar category.
Amazon is way out performing brick and mortar stores in this household. Even if I can walk into a store in town (where the selection is horribly limited by the way), very often they will be out of stock on what I want and the price will be high.
Often, the price is lower at Amazon and the thing might qualify for free shipping. Meaning I don't even have to bear the cost of driving in to town to shop for something that (1) they don't carry or (2) don't have in stock.
There are a lot of us people out here in the sticks who are starting to figure this out.