“I’m 1n yr A7l4n74z, k1llin yr d00dz” - Sh3rm4n5645
I almost forgot – besides the three bookstores in my OP, the linked article lists another store in West Roxbury, and I also learned from someone in Scituate that their one and only bookstore is closing, too.
The West Roxbury stores closed back in March, but that gives three stores more recently closed, in addition to those two earlier this year. Derby Square books closed earlier this year, too, to be replaced by the new Salem bookshop. So we have six closings in the Boston area in the past year, balanced by one opening.
There are still indy bookstores selling new books and a few used bookstores in the area, but you gotta look for them. And the internet often doesn’t alert you to a closed bookstore.
Then again, if you can find a simple PDF version then you solve that problem.
I miss bookstores, believe me, but the other side of the coin is is that so much is available online which, in the old days, would be difficult if not impossible to obtain locally. It’s been a boon for those interested regional and local history, as more and more public domain works are scanned into Google Books or the Prelinger archive, among others.
I’m not saying it’s better, though–it’s just different.
I do agree that old fashion book stores are dying or zombies. But over here in Phoenix I found a very nice new and used book store that just opened:
Trading Hands, at The Newton
Unlike other book stores mentioned, the place is usually packed, so I think they are figuring out how to keep some old fashion reading material to sell and trade. The best part is that it has a restaurant and other small shops around and it includes a coffee shop and bar with a space with wi-fi for students, writers and other groups to meet.
Maybe I will organize a dope-giraffe-fest there as we haven’t had one in years. 
But there will always be “Black Books” for posterity. I can see it now, watching an old episode and my grandkids come into the room looking confusedly at the screen and I’ll say. "Yep, there used to be one in every town . . . "
Ziploc freezer baggie. Works like a charm, unless you’re *really *a butterfingers. 
Coupling a bookstore with a restaurant or coffee shop seems to be the lastest dodge. The aforementioned TRident Bookstore/Café on Newbury street in Boston is doing this, and the Prudential Center Barnes and Noble has a Starbucks. Bestsellers Café in Medford MA sells noshes, too.
It didn’t save Books and Beans, in Southbridge MA, which shut down after a couple of years in operation. But I see that they’ve apparently been resurrected recently, in a new home.
None of the ones I’ve listed before this in this thread had cafes or coffeeshops.
Have observed that, yes.
FWIW, in the biggest mall in San Juan, the *coffeeshop * at what was Borders survived the store closing!
My community hasn’t had a bookstore since Waldenbooks went bust. And it was about 10 feet wide by 30 feet deep.
The used book market is also eliminated with e-books. And publishers can alter and take away e-books on a whim. And one EMP, solar flare, or virus to the cloud becomes a Library of Alexandria situation. And, until the price of readers go way way down, the poor become more and more locked out of reading.
The real solution, it would seem, is to couple a bookstore with a business that’s more than sufficiently profitable, with the bookselling aspect just a loss…trailer.
“‘The Lotus Caves’ Used and New Scifi-Fantasy Bookstore & Legal Marijuana Dispensary” springs to mind, immediately. I imagine you could do something similar with a bordello or an Indian casino.
Well, there’s an interesting Kickstarter opportunity! 
I can see it right now. Instead of a steakhouse bar & grill attached to the strip club, have a bookstore/coffeehouse. Have a book-club discussion with girls in nothing but g-strings and 6" heels for $300/hr in the Private Reading Room and each latte is $25! Of course, it helps if the girls really are working their way through university…
“It’s GOLD, Jerry!!”
Everything dies. That is a great sadness, but something many of our finest books have been telling us for years. And I imagine that the lifespan of e-books will be somewhat less than the lifespan of the printed-on-paper word.
Read Woody Allens’ The Whore of Mensa:
The vast majority of paper books don’t last more than 50 years. With proper curation, an eBook is infinite.
I always shop at used bookstores because the books I want have generally either been in print for ages (so why should I shell out $25 for the 200th reprinting when I can get the 25th reprint for $2?) or they were generally printed in the 70s or before (see previous quote in thread about a lot of pre-1970’s science fiction being widely unavailable in ebooks and even out of print in paper books). When I’m at a used bookstore, it’s easy to discover new books or books I wasn’t thinking of looking for (especially when it comes to mythology or history) - at the low, low price of $2 to $7 each. I easily walk out with $50 worth of books every time I go to a used bookstore. Barnes & Noble doesn’t stock what I want because it only carries new, popular books. Randomly finding old books on Amazon is a pain in the ass, to say the least. And I can’t inspect the book quality in person. I have no desire to read books on a kindle. Hell, I just looked up a couple of my favorite books and they’re not available as ebooks on amazon anyway.
And to top it off, for the last few years all the books I’ve searched for at my local library have not been in the catalogue. There is no “Return of Tarzan” to lend out. There’s no “Post Captain”. So on and so forth.
So I hope the bookstore I frequent stays open forever. I’m certainly trying to keep them open with my money, anyway. It’s been a dream of mine to open a tea shop/bookstore/printing press but frankly I’d be pretty scared at how poor the prospects seem. And of course the whole not-financially-well-off-enough thing. At least by the time I am well off enough to consider my own business, I can re-evaluate the market at that point to see if it truly is dead.
By the way, I have a book from 1881 that is in great condition and perfectly fine for reading without some sort of white glove approach. So pooh on the part where they don’t last very long. You just have to buy sturdily made hardbacks and treat them well.
Considering how poorly prepared we are as a society for solar flares and similar phenomena like natural EMPs, maybe not
In the end if you REALLY want your book to last you’ll need to have it engraved on a basalt stela in three languages/scripts 
Plus with print I do not need to worry about DRM or about the format becoming unsupported. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve bought a whole bunch of Kindle/Nook books. But I know I’ll probably have to buy them all over again, or else at some point hack the files and port them to an open format on nonvolatile media several times over, if I want to still read them years from now.
That depends largely on the paper and the binding. Good-quality books will last for many decades without any care at all.