<i>with eBooks, you don't really need shelf space.</i><p>I predict that the extent to which this turns out to be false will surprise us all.<p>Shelf space at a bookstore is the <i>primary advertising medium</i> for books. Most people don't consult the <i>New York Review of Books</i>. Most people see very few book advertisements. Even those of us who do most of their book buying online still wander through bookstores and libraries. Physical objects have a powerful draw. I buy almost all of my computer equipment online, and yet I still find myself wandering through the Apple Store, just to experience the physical presence of computers and computer users.<p>Dedicated physical bookstores are going to get even harder to keep open. They might get smaller. They might continue to diversify until they're basically cafes with books lining the walls, or small performance spaces where authors gather to hold readings, or something. But I suspect that, somehow, the biggest and most successful publishers will continue producing copies of physical books and putting them on shelf displays in places where readers are likely to gather, just to get those books in front of people's eyes at the exact moment when those people are in a book-browsing mood.<p>Then they'll sell electronic copies. Right there in the store. Barnes and Noble apparently agrees with me: They're plugging the Nook front and center in their brick-and-mortar stores.<p>Or, maybe I'm wrong. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.<p>PS: To anticipate every reader's first objection to my wacky hypothesis: This didn't save the music stores because music is inherently unbrowseable in a store. Music stores used to have little listening stations with headphones, but did anyone ever actually use those things? They never had what I wanted to hear. The iTunes store blows that experience away, to say nothing of Pandora or YouTube or a filesharing network.