Have you checked this article out yet, Paul?

"Spamazon"

It's quite interesting.

Am I the only one who has gone to the Boders on 4th Ave and thought "gee talk about a shit load of dead space that must cost a lot of money to pay rent on".

And the Barnes and Noble at U Village you can say the same thing about as well.

Love me some public library.

I went to a bookstore recently. To buy a book. I deliberately chose to go to B&N to pick up the second book in a series on the way to work instead of ordering it online and waiting an extra day or two (no ereader and probably not in the near future).
Won't make that mistake again. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and I was there first thing in the morning. I can't image what had happened to the staff's attitude by the time lunchtime rolled around.
Next time, I'll just pre-order online and be done with it (no local bookstore carries mass market paperbacks like this one, and even if they did, they're usually worse than the chains).

Wifes birthday is comming up and she's getting a Nook Touch with a 16 GB MicroSDHC filled with epub books or gutenberg project books.

Add me to the list of people who are helping destroy book stores.

@1, thank you for that. I was already seeing the beginnings of that kind of crap when I stopped charging my Kindle almost a year ago. The 99-cent "books" that are scraped off the net are bad enough, but the plagiarized books are truly shocking. And Amazon rakes in the same dough either way. ITunes in comparison, or even Amazon's music, shoe, etc. businesses, are paragons of virtue.

It would be like going to a huge bookstore but finding out that 99% of the volumes on the shelf are just blank newsprint inside.