Alive, but gradually slipping towards life support. Right now my daily habits include regular trips to Borders to browse the books for the price of a coffee. B

Alive, but gradually slipping towards life support. Right now my daily habits include regular trips to Borders to browse the books for the price of a coffee. But in another year or two I expect that I will have switched to toting around some kind of tablet/ebook device to get a more flexible reading experience. I've already started feeling constrained by the selection available from a single store. I'm waiting on the technology to settle down a little, work through the early-adopter headaches, and present a really solid experience before I switch, but once I make that switch I'll have no reason to prefer Borders for coffee drinking - I could go anywhere to do my reading. I know I'm not alone in this behavior. I'll buy newspapers sometimes while I'm out, but that's about it. Borders is already a company in trouble, and I don't see any reason for their fortunes to go up unless they make a drastic business model change to reflect the rise of e-reading. It won't be much different for other booksellers; niche literature will last for longer since they won't be digitized for a while, but mainstream publishing is about to get clobbered. Paper for writing, sketches, and other creative tasks will stick around for a long time to come, though. I can buy a tiny pocket notebook and pencils for ~$5, and they'll continue to beat out the high-tech stuff for a good many years to come. The "iSomethingSomething" might be that killer device, or it might wait for another generation or two. There is no "if" in my mind about the overall direction of things, though.