Living in rural America, I have been a three-hour round-trip away from a decent bookstore since my love for reading blossomed in the early '70s.
There was a tiny christian bookstore in town that closed when I was very young (and a news-stand that had a handful of best-sellers that closed before I got out of high-school). We had a tiny, largely unsatisfying library, yes, but other than that, I never had a real chance to fall in love with browsing physical bookstores that contained books I wanted to read. That's why online bookstores (pre-ebook) were such a godsend to me. And then ebooks made things even better.
Before that (and until I went off to college), it was me selecting books from one of those school programs where you ordered them and got them six weeks later, Christmas and birthday wishlists, and those rare Sunday trips to a "big city" bookstore with whatever money I'd managed to scrape together. And then of course the occasional road-trip after I had my driver's license.
So phooey on B&M bookstores. Don't miss 'em one bit. They didn't do a thing for me. If it hadn't been for inter-library loans, I wouldn't have been able to read much of anything from my local library either.
EDIT: by the way. Does anyone remember the name of any of those school programs? I've been searching with no luck whatsoever. It wasn't BookMobile, those were loans (though we had that, too). The one I remember had a "catalog" and an order-form that had check-boxes you checked beside the books you wanted. The day those stacks of bundled-up books showed up on the teachers desk were some the best days I remember from elementary school. I was never so happy as when I was lugging those things home after school (back when "book bags" were still day-packs for hikers)!
