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Barnes and Noble went bust in the UK. I think they came in and tried to expand too quickly in expensive locations at the same time that Amazon started to hit them in the USA.

Waterstones, a native chain, seems to be doing well.

Independents are doing well or badly depending on various factors. For example, there are two specialist used bookshops where I live, one new book shop, a WH Smiths (who stock paperbacks, mostly) and a big charity bookshop selling secondhand modern stuff. This is in a town with about 11,000 population and some outlying villages, 30 minutes drive from several large towns and cities. We also have a library.

OTOH, the specialist children's bookshop in Richmond, where I used to live, recently had to shut down after 25 years in business. The owner specifically said the reason was people coming in for advice and then buying the book cheaper off Amazon. It is a real shame because she used to get authors in for events and loads of stuff like that.

Barnes and noble are going bust around here. There are pretty good bookstores outside of B&N. mostly smaller indies that are doing ok.

I don't think he was implying that "reading" was going out of style, but rather paper books.

I would argue that paper books are doing just fine, but the modern easy access to the 2nd hand market (Amazon, used book stores, libraries with Friends of the Library book stores) is killing the publishing model of the 80's and 90's. Sure, ebooks are taking a chunk of the purchases away, but since used books are cheaper than ebooks for the most part, heavy readers are going for them over ebooks. Cheap ebooks will, of course, do very well, too. But they have not made paper books obsolete.

E books are great for cheap fiction and if you have not got enough room for keeping all your books. I would rebuy all of Iain M Bank's SF books as e books to save the shelf space if they were cheap enough.

E books are let down by the small display size and difficulty of access to index, maps, marginal notes and page tags, in any kind of history or reference work.

B&N is doing great where I live, simply because of the amount I spend on N52 TPBs.

They should just spin this as the top ten cyber cities in the USA.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
They should just spin this as the top ten cyber cities in the USA.

Anyone who has been to those cities would know better.

This is from the BBC and concerns the UK but it's an interesting look at literacy divides.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26515836

 cincydooley wrote:
Yeah. With no cities in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, or Louisiana, it's a little hard to believe.

The study did say "In cities with at least 250,000 people". There are only 3 in Louisiana that meet that criteria (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport).

Methodology: Based on the report published by Central Connecticut State University, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the literacy ranking of 77 U.S. cities with populations of at least 250,000. The study reviewed city literacy based on six categories — library systems, bookstores, educational attainment, digital readership, and newspapers and other publications. Education metrics considered by Miller are from 2012, library system data is from fiscal year 2010, and circulation, publication, and bookstore figures are from 2013. To determine the availability of each reading material, the study measured circulation relative to the size of the population. 24/7 Wall St. also reviewed 2012 data from the Census Bureau, including income, and poverty.