First it was Computer Literacy at North First and Trimble, then the Computer Literacy on Lawrence and then the Stacy on Stevens Creek ...
These are the bookstores I used to frequent but are no longer around. The only one left is the Digital Guru on Lawrence and I wonder how long can it survive!!
I understand the economics behind it. The online bookstores provide much deeper discounts and hence drive away the buyers from real bookstores. Take this case -- Today morning I bought the "Red Hat Linux 8 Bible" at Digital Guru (Mainly because it had Red Hat 8 installation CDs which I was looking for and I didn't want to wait for 3-4 days that an online order would have taken) for 46 dollars, at 15% discount on printed price of 49.99 (the difference is accounted by the state sales tax of 8.25%). In a normal case, I would have looked at the book in the bookstore, would have made the decision to buy, come back home, go online, look for best price at either BookPool or Amazon and then place the order. How much would have I saved -- $11 at Amazon, or $18.75 at BookPool, assuming that I would have bought a couple of more books and would have got free shipping.
These are substantial savings by any means.
Of course, the downside is that I may not have this luxury for very long !!