I am not going to bullshit you, I am not a bookworm. I am not too big on books. What I was big on was magazines and this place rarely disappoints. I have a 44 dollar a month magazine habit. And that is just the minimal. And this place would have everything to get me my fix and rarely disappoint which says something that lots of other stores can't. I remember when all we had 15-20 years ago were Crown Books and Waldenbooks. Both were small bookstores and nothing special. All they sold were books and had a tiny magazine rack. 
Waldenbooks and Crown came and left and then came in Borders and Barnes and Noble. And they came in STRONG! These super bookstores started popping up everywhere. They were HUGE! They sold all kinds of stuff that you would never guess that belonged in a bookstore. They even had a full coffee bar so you can drink your cafe latte and read books you haven't purchased (yet). I knew the music was clearly a ripoff (in both Barnes and B&N), and so were the DVDs but that's OK. I thought that these stores were the only ones selling Cd's. All the music stores have already been "killed off" already. 
Something I learned about a couple of years ago did alarm me about bookstores in general. I learned about Sales Per Square Foot (Annual). People actually figured out the highest performing retail stores in respect to their physical size. To put it into perspective the Forum Shops have some sort of mall record with $1,500/SF. As for retail stores, Apple and Tiffany's do very well at the top ($4,406 and $2,700 respectively). As for Bookstores, they are on the other side of the spectrum with $125- $275 Sales Per Square Foot. The national average for malls is $300 to put it into perspective. Hot Topic does pretty good at $600. So that doesn't look good. The fact of these mega bookstores is that they have HUGE rent and they sell (relatively) cheap goods like books. Off the top of my head, the most expensive thing B&N/Borders had was like a DVD box set for a couple of hundred bucks. Last time I checked, people were not lining up for those goods. Most of people purchased books and magazines (like me!). I would say the average purchase was what $20? When you have a super huge store, you have super huge rent and you need to make ends meet somehow!
All these pictures are from the Borders in the Arcadia Mall. This was the last one I knew of that was still open. The place was like a tornado went through in there and kind of depressing. All the stuff had been picked through and all the good stuff is gone.
I am hoping that B&N learns from this debacle so it doesn't share the same fate in Internet Nirvana.
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