Are Bookstores to be a thing of the past?

Like many people I love to read and usually look to my local bookstores to get my new books. I consider myself a sort of 'fun' book collector and currently own roughly 4,000 volumes. However, due to the economy, technology, and changing agendas, future generations may not have the good fortune of going over to their local bookstore to pick up a good read.

I first started noticing the troublesome matter regarding disappearing bookstores about two years ago when the local bookstores in the area started closing.

The Columbia Mall in Grand Forks, N.D. had three brand-name bookstores up until 2009 when they closed their Barnes N’ Noble branch and their Waldenbooks mall branch. In March 2009.

In Dec. 2009, the Waldenbooks mall store in Grand Forks closed, (Waldenbooks is a branch of the Borders Company). On the plus side the store had a 50% off sale as its closing sale and I got a lot of good reads for a great deal and there was still one bookstore in the mall.

Then, in December of 2010, the Grand Forks mall closed their BDalton bookstore, a branch of the Barnes N’ Noble chain, and so Grand Forks now has no new bookstores, only a few small used bookstores scattered throughout the city.
 Fargo, N.D. currently only has a Barnes N’ Noble bookstore, as well as, a few small new and used bookstores that can be found downtown and in various strip malls around the city. Fargo used to have a BDalton Bookstore in the West Acres Shopping Mall but that store was closed in Jan. 2010, right after Waldenbooks closed in Grand Forks.

“Barnes & Noble had operated the UND bookstore for 10 years before it lost its lease in March 2009. Today, the store is called the UND Bookstore and, as before, it carries some new popular book titles. Mostly, however, it devotes its space to textbooks, university clothing and other items.” - http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/188412/

The Bloomington mall also closed it's bookstores, for more information watch the video above.

I find this all very sad as I come from a small town (Hensel, N.D.) about an hour and a half North of Grand Forks, so now, if I was to move back home, the closest new bookstore would be the Barnes N’ Noble here in Fargo N.D.

According to its website, Barnes & Noble is the No. 1 bookseller in the U.S., operating about 1,255 bookstores including 729 superstores and another 635 college bookstores. In North Dakota, there are Barnes & Noble’s in Fargo, Bismarck and Minot.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/

If I want to get a book when I am visiting at home it seems that I will have to go online and pay for shipping from one of the many online bookstores that have become popular today. The other closest town to my dad’s farm is Devil’s Lake, which has one small used bookstore and a few thrift stores that sometimes have a good selection of used books.

I blame all these bookstore closings on the web and the new e-readers which began to become popular around 2007, though I may be getting a Kindle for Easter from my mom, so maybe I will think differently when I am part of the mass e-reader club.

Amazon released its first version of the Kindle in November 2007. To give Borders credit, it did manage to quickly follow up by partnering with Sony to sell its e-reader in stores, but it overlooked a prime opportunity to develop its own device.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/20/the-borders-story-is-this-the-final-chapter.html

Now there are many other e-readers other than kindle to choose from as well as applications for the iPad and your computer. At least I will be able to get some books that I have wanted to read that are currently only available to e-readers and are not in print.