Yeah, I've been waiting for that one. Sad. The slow death of the bookstore in general is a great sadness to me.
There was a time when I lived in towns with great independent and used bookstores (Madison, Berkeley, to a lesser extent Geneva), when I would have welcomed this news, seeing B&N as the big interloper intent on putting long-term "serious" bookstores out of business. I regarded B&N as a bookstore killer. For one thing, no B&N ever smelled like a bookstore. At best, they smell like coffee shops. At worst, they smell like any big box store.
Then I moved out of those places and my nearest big city is Fresno... and I realized that B&N coming into a place like that or into the town I grew up in, was the difference between having a decent bookstore and not having one.
