Part of it is no longer having eighty linear feet of ten-foot high bookcases anymore, part of it is just that the Kindle is so damned convenient for most books,

Part of it is no longer having eighty linear feet of ten-foot high bookcases anymore, part of it is just that the Kindle is so damned convenient for most books, and Safari only slightly less so. (And it's not as if I don't visit bookstore at all -- I walked out of a used bookstore the other day with a monograph on NLP and a copy of The Grand Strategy of Phillip II, both of which were serendipitous finds.) But there's definitely a crowding-out effect with e-books, or even Amazon's many books for a penny (plus S&H). With Amazon, I no longer have to search widely for a particular book or topic, but that also means I'm not going to randomly wander through other sections and suddenly discover buried gold. In a certain sense, I have more information about a narrow segment of the market -- the specific book I'm looking for -- but less information about the market in general.