Plus you can sample ebooks at your leisure. Not so in a bookstore since Borders shut down. There are no sofas in WHSmiths or Waterstones in the Uk. I can sit in Costa with a coffee and browse Amazon on free wifi all day!!
There's still a couple of places that sell books in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee that have a few sofas, or at least chairs, so I have to assume there's a similar situation elsewhere in the UK if only in the larger cities. That's not to say that book shops aren't a dying breed but I can't see them all disappearing just yet. Even if they were to vanish, I can't imagine Amazon etc. would ever stop selling paperbacks while there remains a viable market. While the use of technology is on the rise, that doesn't necessarily mean the demand for physical possessions is falling drastically, or at all.
A recent article by the BBC reports a 66% increase in sales for digital books and only a 1% decrease for physical. It also reports that Waterstones have actually seen a rise in physical sales.
Convenience and technological advances - specifically digital media in this case - aren't always necessary, nor do they become the norm. A lot of what is going on just now is nothing more than companies attempting to get their fingers into all available pies. It was the same with social media - companies spread resources too thin while trying to create a viable online presence by having 4, 5, 6 or even more social media profiles. The figures now see them consolidating because they've realised that each social network is more useful for specific types of business. In that sense, I can see places where small flats are the norm - you mentioned a fair number earlier in the thread - to go purely digital but don't see it as the end of physical products globally.
An alternative explanation for the closing of high street stores is the fact that many companies expanded far beyond their reach. Gamestation/GAME, and GameStop in the US are prime examples of this. They're closing stores now because the economic downturn made the large expansion plans unviable and there's now a need for consolidation. Rising digital sales have a hand in this to a certain extent but downsizing and consolidation is happening in every sector. In the UK, the only company I can think of that hasn't started to consolidate their assets and stop expansion is Greggs still has new stores opening everywhere. While there is a correlation between physical stores closing and a rise in online shopping/digital media, closures are beginning to slow down and should balance out soon. At least that's what analysts appear to think and it seems like a reasonable assumption considering places like Glasgow (sorry for all the Scottish examples, they're the cities I'm most familiar with lol) have seen a lot of empty premises being put to use. This doesn't necessarily mean that a huge growth in physical sales is going to take place but it at least shows that online/digital isn't in a clear dominant position.
Sorry for the huge wall of rambling, I just like to defend physical sales - bit strange really since I just finished a research proposal on the growth of online retailing lmao but it was that research that showed me that online sales aren't controlling as much of the market as we seem to believe.
