Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
It would be a colossal loss for those living close to a B&N but for the rest of us it would be a big shrug. B&N hardly blankets the country. Even adding in a couple thousand independent bookstores leaves vast swaths of the country with no physical bookstore nearby, now or ever.
Physical bookstores have never been all that abundant outside the big metro areas and before the chains started up in the 60's they were rare.
|
Physical stores have basically become unnecessary.
For one thing, one of the purposes that many people had for going into them was to browse in books to see if they might be ones that they'd like to own. The Internet has made that all but unnecessary. You can get previews from Amazon, books.Google.com, various other places (wouldn't it be great if some website would collect links for books to as many preview sites for each book as possible?).
Secondly, there are great costs that brick-and-mortar stores have that virtual stores do not. Off the top of my head, there are utilities (electricity, natural gas, etc.), rent or financing of the building, maintenance, the expense of additional employees than virtual stores require . . . .
And for us budget-minded consumers, $5 for a cappuccino at the coffee bar is more than we want to pay, when we can make the same thing at home for far less, while we surf the bookstores on the web.
It's a business model that is destined to go the way of the dodo bird, except for a few specialized and/or boutique stores.