Huh, I hadn’t thought of that point before, but it’s a good one.
Like with physical movie purchases, they mostly come with a digital copy as well. I know the presence/ absence of one has a measurable impact on if I buy the disk.
Mark, I nominate you to go on the board of B&N now.
I see major chain bookstores going the way of Sam Goody music stores: there’s just no space for them that makes sense.
But there’s plenty of space for independent, hustling record stores that can cater to their own individual markets and niches very, very well, and those stores are thriving.
I sense that the same will be true of book stores. Indies will thrive.
Honestly though B&N has carried the best children’s toys, in the best environment, for years. Great board games like Carcassonne, tons of architecture Legos, all the Yu-Gi-Oh and Tomagac… um… Pokemon stuff, STEM stuff, ect. They also have the only remaining magazine stand worth anything.
But I generally don’t buy dead tree books because of space. I have kind-of / sort-of gotten into buying smaller scale printed materials - 6.5"x4.5" seems just about the perfect size - and keep my eyes open for anything new.
I buy about 10 books a year (when I’m in a hurry or getting a gift) and 2-3 notebooks from Barnes & Noble and I like the cafe. I hope they make it. There was a time when I didn’t like the idea of a corporate book chain displacing local but we are way past that now and I’ll take any bookstore.
(I also shop at my local used bookshop but it’s like a perpetual garage sale in there. Sometimes I just want to look at new books that aren’t dusty.)
I’d be more bummed by B&N ebooks disappearing vs the brick & mortar stores. Amazon needs as much competition as possible & I’d rather buy & unlock ePub format books vs the various Kindle formats. There are increasingly many of those & they are a pain-in-the-ass to unprotect.
Diego
Do you have a physical Kindle?
No, but I’ve purchased amazon ebooks before when there were no other good options. They can be a pain to convert into more open formats.
I have a physical kindle. Using the apprentice Alf de-drm tools in Calibre it is trivial to remove DRM. It decrypts using your serial number.
If you want to de-drm Kindle books a lot it is worth getting one. About once a month I decrypt my purchases this way.
So my Nook will become a slice of the past, preserved in amber, until the battery craps out.
That’s what happened to my wife’s Nook, sadly. One day it just stopped charging. Dead.
We’ve owned a couple of Kindle Fires since then. They’re not very good in comparison.
I used to love hanging out in bookstores. I bought a ton of books (I bet that applies to many of us here). But now I buy about two hardcovers a year – generally things with illustrations or diagrams that don’t work on Kindle. Everything else goes to my Kindle Voyage.
That Voyage is among my dearest possessions. If you had told little-kid Oghier that he’d one day be able to carry thousands of books around in his pocket, he’d have done the dance of joy.
While the brick and mortar B&N is for the most part dying off. I wouldnt write of the online entity of B&N anytime soon. They just released a new Nook reader that competes with the Kindle Paperwhite thing. Frankly I preferred the old Nook over Kindle but I do a lot of business with Amazon and they practically threw a Kindle at me for free so I am now kind of trapped in that ecosystem of ereading and the Nook only gets used when I want to re-read something I already have on it.
I know just how you feel. I carry My Tab A everywhere, and I have about 30,000 books on the Micro card. I routinely tell people that we’ve reached the point where I genuinely have a Tricorder!