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Barnes and Noble Bookstore Chain Put In Play
suraj.sun sends in word that the country's largest bookstore chain, Barnes and Noble, will put itself up for sale. "The news surprised analysts and alarmed publishers, who have watched as the book business has increasingly shifted to online retailers and e-book sales, leaving both chains and independent sellers struggling. ... For years, Barnes & Noble has been battered by large shifts in the publishing industry and the retail environment. Book sales have moved toward big-box stores like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target, and away from mall-based stores like B. Dalton, which Barnes & Noble acquired in the late 1980s. 'There's been a long series of pressures,' said David Schick, managing director at Stifel Nicolaus in Baltimore. 'The market has not been kind to bookstores, and it's for new reasons like competition with Apple and Amazon, and it's for old reasons, like what we believe has been a decline in reading for the last 20 years. Americans have devoted less of what we call media time to books.'"
But honestly, if it wasn't for IsoHunt, would you have really spent the $150 or just done without? You acquired them because they were free and easy. If you *had* to pay, odds are you would have either gotten fewer or none at all.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
My Father-in-Law and I are both IT Professionals who are also serious literary geeks. We both have similar views to yours on the benefits of physical books. We also have noticed that there are two type of "Geeks" out there -- the "real" geek and the "cool" geek. The cool geek is the guy with all the newest gadgets and a "phone" that does everything except make him coffee in the morning, they buy the tech because it's "cool". The real geek wants a cell phone that is just a cell phone, but does it's job better than any other phone out there, the real literary geek will most likely never switch to e-books unless they are dragged screaming and kicking the entire way because physical books are "just a book" but it does what it is meant to do, and so far it does it better than any e-book out there.