Take a survey of your friends and see how many of them still use brick and mortar book stores. Speaking for myself, since the onset of online book stores, I can't remember the last time I walked into a conventional book store.
Even if Amazon.com had never come into existence, inevitably online book stores would have made their way to the Internet. Online book stores were one of the first industries to make it successfully online. And it makes perfect sense because at the deepest level, the Internet is all about information.
There is one huge difference between an online book store and a brick and mortar store. The cost. An online book store makes it handy for a book lover to access books from all over the globe, search them, browse through, and order them through the click of a mouse - and you can build such a store with hardly any infrastructure.
Conversely, if you wanted to start a brick and mortar book store the initial capital costs involved would be extensive. And it would be nearly impossible to maintain enough inventory to satisfy the wide variety of customer needs.
But with an online book store, such issues disappear. An online book store can allow users to browse through million of titles, read reviews regarding the books and then order them if they feel like it.
The online book store owner simply orders the book and mails it to the consumer. An online book store not only increases the book options you can make available to your customers but it does it by minimizing your inventory costs.
This is the reason why even companies, which started their lives as conventional brick and mortar book stores have converted themselves into online book stores. The most well known name that comes to mind is Barnes and Noble. They were once exclusively an offline store. But they changed with the times.
Amazon is the original online book store that has set the standard for all others. It is the best example of how good an online book store can be. It predicts the books you might be interested in reading with amazing accuracy.
To summarize, the online book store is here to stay.
