So, physical bookstores are going to completely disappear? Just as physical computer stores completely disappeared? Except, come to think of it, my last three

So, physical bookstores are going to completely disappear? Just as physical computer stores completely disappeared? Except, come to think of it, my last three computers were picked up at a physical computer store. It feels impossible for brick-and-mortar stores like B&N to survive on their current scale (though never say never – it always seemed like a miracle that those stores could have existed at such scale in the first place, fifteen years and more after the invention of the web). But I suspect that something made of bricks and mortar is going to take their place. It might look more like a public library or a coffeeshop or a student union, because most of the actual books will be sold electronically, but people are going to continue to have a place to go which has the parts of bookstores that they like: The browsing, the occasional chair, the librarian/bookseller/knowledgeable person, the cafe, the company of other readers. And, yes, perhaps even displays of books. Because sitting alone in your apartment in front of a screen gets old. And because a shelf full of physical books and magazines still makes an impressive, and fairly inexpensive, display ad for books and magazines. Even the aforementioned Apple store, as well as the office-supply store down the street, still has a few boxes of software sitting on a shelf – even though software doesn't come in boxes anymore, to the extent that many of those software boxes have nothing inside them but a thin paper slip with a URL and a code on it, and even though boxed software, unlike a physical book, is not browseable, which destroys most of the value of having it on a shelf. Software boxes are merely well-designed shiny props. And, yet, some of them are still there. Props are useful things. Humans have more senses than one, and we like to engage them all when we shop. Of course, the structure of the bookselling business is going to change, and some sections really will just disappear. For example, the softening of the college textbook market seems like a harbinger: College textbooks are incredibly expensive relative to other books, most buyers really only want to rent them, they don't rely on bookstore displays to market them (because most of them are sold to a captive audience), and the people who buy them already have perfectly good places to hang out with other college-textbook readers (we call them colleges).