Bookstores are fast becoming nothing more than display cases for books I might want to buy online.
I was at Indigo flipping through a book that looked interesting and I decided to buy it, from the Amazon Kindle store on my iPhone that is. The physical book was $20.50 (plus tax). I only spent $5.56 for it through Kindle. That’s almost $15 in savings.
For those who are wondering, I would have bought it through Indigo’s Kobo eBookstore (support Canadian companies and all that), but not only did it cost $11.99 through them, their website was abysmally slow on my iPhone (and failed to load my search results twice), whereas the Kindle store was ridiculously speedy and much cheaper. Indigo/Chapters might want to look into that.
In addition to all that, I’m also finding that I just prefer reading eBooks more than physical books these days. The convenience of being able to carry my entire library with me in my pocket is reason enough for me to switch almost entirely to eBooks, but I’m also one of those people who actually prefers reading on a screen over paper as well.
What do you think? Do bookstores still have a future?