Quote:
Originally Posted by radleyp
You make a very good point: Starbucks (and similar coffee shops) is a good place to read! Starbucks is already a major seller of cd's, so why not books (or, better, ebooks from a kiosk)? Moreover, two of the biggest booksellers in the US today are not bookstores at all: Costco and Walmart are general purpose stores that also sell cd's and blenders and tires and lots of food! That surely tells us that the bookseller as we have known it is changing!
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Isn't this exactly what Barnes & Noble is aiming for with the nook? At least in the US, that is. They're combining the b&m browsing/Starbucks experience with in-store wi-fi access and e-book browsing and purchasing. I can't believe this wasn't their primary motivation for the way the device and service are organized.
Let's face it, the one place in which e-books fail miserably is the browsing and shopping experience. While some people who have gone e-book don't care about that, a great many others do, even those of us who do read e-books. It's also just about the only way to convert a large portion of p-only readers, which the industry needs to do in order to get the numbers high enough to make the publishers care about what e-book buyers think.