This is from an old interview on Wired.com with jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. I thought it was very interesting:

How much of retail sales do you think eventually will be online, and how much offline?
I think online ultimately will be 10 to 15 percent of retail. The vast majority of retailing will stay in the physical world because people have acute needs, they want things now. Also, there are products, like a yard rake, where the economics of delivery don’t make sense. But a 600-pound table saw is a great item to sell online because it always gets delivered. And it’s expensive enough that there is enough profit in it to cover the cost of shipping. Plasma TVs, same idea.

Do physical bookstores have anything to offer that Amazon doesn’t?
One thing is face-to-face meetings with authors. And what Howard Schultz at Starbucks likes to call a third place, where people go and sit and spend time. We humans are a gregarious species; we like to mingle with other humans.

Will physical bookstores ever do print-on-demand?
That’s a possibility, but I think that’s a pretty small part of what would happen there. Print-on-demand actually plays more to the strengths of the online world. We already have many in our catalog, but it’s invisible to you, the customer. We use a number of companies that do the actual printing, but we mail them like regular books. They look like regular trade paperbacks.
Read the full interview on Wired

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