Quote:
Originally Posted by Ken Maltby
What "Gap"? Why should a book (paper or electronic) be any different from all the things that are increasingly being purchased Online? If there is no need to actually hold it in your hand, to insure it fits, or insure that it is really what it claims to be, more and more are buying online.
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There is something different here - one book is not a perfect replacement for another.
B&M bookshops do some important and useful work: they select the books they want to display, and can give some useful advice. My wife (the home's heavy reader) won't buy any book online, because she explicitly wants to support the local bookshops (Note that she's not paying more for them because of this, because we have a law in France that prevents books from being discounted - specifically, books have to be sold at the editor's fixed price, with a maximum allowed discount of 5%). I'd be very happy to also support the same bookstores, but having converted to ebooks, I just cannot - they don't sell ebooks. So all I can do is take their advice, and then buy my books online...
I was thinking maybe this specific price protection law we have was one reason why local (independent) bookshops have stayed so far away from ebooks, but from
sakura-panda's message, it seems they have mostly done the same in other places as well.