...
That changed with South Dakota v. Wayfair. States can now require out of state sellers without a physical presence within the state to collect sales tax as long as the sellers meet a threshold of activity (dollar value and/or quantity of transactions) and the states do not discriminate against or place undue burdens on such commerce.
I had forgotten about that ruling, 2018 (I think). The writing was on the wall, 'Zon began charging sales tax before the ruling.
R.C.
About the same time the Australian government cracked down on multinational corporations avoiding paying GST, and Amazon started collecting GST here, so all book prices went up. The same happened in Europe with their various taxes. So it wasn't just a US thing. The world woke up to tax avoidance, and started applying the tax on where the buyer was, rather than where the seller was. Amazon just had to adapt.
The problem with B&N, at least any store I've been in for the past decade, is that their selection is so ridiculously limited that they're really only carrying the big names and the books they're being paid to stick on the shelves. The world is so much bigger than any bookstore can stick in the shelves anymore. The last time I went in, just to look through the science fiction books, I was terribly disappointed by the tiny selection they offer. A lot of mainstream books, a lot of graphic novels, nothing that I'd actually want to pick up and read. I walked out empty-handed. I can get everything I want on Amazon and making new discoveries is simple, I don't have to rely on what B&N thinks I ought to want to read, I can find what I actually want to read.
Same goes for every book store I've ever been in, or even book chain.
Until the advent of Amazon, I'd regularly go into the local bookstores, which kept disappearing over time as their chains folded, and scan the limited shelves of scifi and fantasy desperately looking for something to read. And usually finding nothing.
For a long time the only new books to turn up were the next Star Wars ones, and that's one reason I was so pissed off with Disney, because those books were damned important to me as the only thing keeping me reading for a long time.
Someone gave me QBD voucher in 2019. I gave it to my mum a couple of weeks ago, because I'd never been able to find a book to buy from them with, even with them being online now. Every single book I might have wanted was out of stock or out of print. And yet the same books were on Amazon for 2 day delivery. My mum does still go into the book stores, and tends to buy the on special books, so she'll likely use the voucher before it expires at the end of this year. I wasn't going to be able to.
Bookstores here didn't stock even a quarter of the books available in the US. As soon as I discovered Kindle (belatedly in 2013) I found so much to read which was Trad published and never came here, and then tons more which was Indie. Now most of what I buy is Indie.
Just one trip to the US, I came back with a heap of the Star Wars books which were never released here. I found them by accident in a bookstore, not even knowing they existed, because the Australian books were printed here, and they changed the timeline in the front to exclude anything not being released here.
I gave up on bricks and mortar book stores years ago. They were always useless for a reader like me. And given my QBD search recently, still are.