One of the subjects we have been probing for a long time is the inevitable impact that increased purchasing of books online would have on the shelf space at retail and what that would mean to trade publishers. (You'll see that this speech that is well more than a decade old also says publishers are going to have get audience-centric, or vertical, as well.)
Of course, there has already been one shock to the system - one "Black Swan" event - which was the closing of Borders stores in 2011. That suddenly took about 400 very large bookstores out of the supply chain. Since then, the anecdata about independents - which includes encouraging, but unaudited, financial information from the BEABookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States and a lot of rah-rah from thriving indies (a fire we threw a log on with a great break-out session at DBW last week) - has been very upbeat (although Bowker data seems to suggest Amazon gained more from Borders's passing than anybody else did). And while B&N has continued to show some sales slippage, its more drastic setbacks have been in the Nook business, not selling print in stores.
