As a former B&N junkie (used to go there several times a week), for me at least the issue was stock. As Amazon encroached on B&N's business they made the unfortunate and classic mistake of trying to reduce costs, which generally meant keeping less stuff in stock. So now you want say "The Rust Programming Language" book and you want it now? The local B&N doesn't have it, nor do any nearby stores. They can ship to you or ship to store within a few days, or you can just get it on Amazon Prime.

Of course this is a hard problem to solve, they clearly can't have every book you'd want in your local store. But they could have regional warehouses with more stock and either same/next-day to store or even DoorDash type same/next day local delivery.

Ultimately, I think B&N were out matched by the Amazon juggernaut. Shame really, as going to B&N on the way home from dinner at a restaurant was a nice thing to do (wow, remember when you could go out to dinner?).

The problem is that Amazon treats books as a loss leader. Books are a somewhat unique business in general in that you have a huge number of products and thin inventory of most of them (most books at a bookstore will have 1–2 copies in stock with only a few dozen titles with larger inventories). To sell at Amazon discounts would mean in many cases losing money given that bookstores typically pay 60% of the cover price of the book. I did a quick check and saw that Amazon is claiming a 51% discount on The Art of Racing in the Rain although I notice that there are two paperback editions of the book with the same cover available at my local indie, one a trade paperback, the other mass market paperback (the difference is the latter is printed on smaller-sized pages) and the latter has a list price of $9.99. Interestingly, the latter edition, doing a search by ISBN shows up at the same price as the TPB which is—interesting and makes me wonder if they're doing inventory commingling with these two editions.

I'd recommend Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption for a (somewhat dated) look at the unique economics of bookselling. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226525910/donhosek