> because it had effectively become a “showroom” for Internet retailers—people would see books in the store and then buy them online.

I think there might be room for some retail outlets to embrace this. You could imagine a bookshop that was an amazon affiliate, stuck QR codes with their affiliate link to the book over all of the barcodes, had a nice cafe and environment for browsing the large numbers of books they have in stock, but don't actually sell any themselves. They could even arrange to be close to an amazon drop/warehouse so you could get things delivered super fast to the store itself for a small convenience fee.