A lot of avid readers still like to browse in bookstores when they can find them. And a lot of older books have yet to make it to digital format, which can make looking in a used bookstore also worthwhile.
I remember reading that Amazon execs were surprised at the way their bookstores worked. They'd expected them to be like showrooms where people would look at the books and then order online. But in fact, people preferred buying in the store if they were going to buy a paper format.
Somewhat earlier, Waterstones had a similar experience. They'd made a deal with Amazon to sell Kindles in exchange for getting a cut of any purchases people made via Kindle while in the store. (I have hard time visualizing people walking around, looking at books and then buying them elsewhere, though that would make sense for ebook purchases. I think it's one of the patterns that killed Borders.)
However, Waterstones didn't sell as many kindles as it expected, and people didn't spend all that much time walking around the store, kindle in hand, buying titles they liked from Amazon. Go figure! That turned out to be another miscalculation.
(The Waterstones situation is retroactively ironic because the company they'd originally planned to make a deal with was B & N. However, they'd have fared even worse with that, since B & N eventually killed its own Nook program in the UK, burning a lot of buyers in the process.)
