I was disappointed when Borders went out of business. Borders is, er, was the bookstore in my neighborhood. Now my neighborhood doesn't have a bookstore. I used to say that not having a bookstore says something about a neighborhood - if the people who live around you can't sustain a bookstore, you probably don't live in a nice place.

At least I've still got Barnes and Noble. I like going there - particularly for the newsstand. The coffee shops always seem full of people - the Starbucks at the Georgia Tech Barnes and Noble is a central hangout for the Atlanta startup community.

Perhaps if I had a nook or an iPad my gratification would be even more instant. But I don't. I haven't really been motivated to switch formats because I always buy books ahead of my consumption, so I have a bunch of books around that I plan to read, and by the time they are read I'll have collected more. I haven't managed to get myself on the wagon.

Also, I find that I get a lot of reading done at times when I cannot use an electronic device - I read while airplanes taxi.

Am I a dinosaur?

One Motley Fool author has called for B&N to go out of business.

The financials look pretty bad:

Barnes & Noble cut its yearly guidance for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a financial measure known as Ebitda, to between $150 million to $180 million. In December it said that figure would be at the low end of the range of $210 million to $250 million.

The bookseller expects a yearly loss of $1.40 to $1.10 per share on total sales between $7 billion and $7.2 billion. The loss is far greater than the loss of10 cents to 50 cents Barnes & Noble forecast in August. And it’s bigger than the 63 cents per share expected by analysts, according to Fact Set. Analysts expect revenue of $7.34 billion.

Given the number of people who always seem to be in these stores when I go there, I find this surprising, but perhaps they are just there for the coffee?

What will happen when Barnes & Noble dies? There is something about the task of "going to the book store" that I enjoy. Its a fun outing.

I used to think that record stores played an important roll in our culture - "going to the record store" was an activity that I enjoyed.

Bill Schulz remembers doing just that. "We used to come in from Hamilton ... on Saturdays ... and buy our records and you always got good deals. It was always fun to come to the city."

Now the record stores are gone, much to my dismay, replaced by a corner of Target.

Will Target beef up it's book and magazine selection after the death of the bookstore? Many Targets already have a Starbucks. Will the intellectual scene be found crowding into a corner of the big box retail store, fluorescent lights beaming down on the red particle board newsstand as they traipse back and forth across the long line of cash registers in their black trench coats and flat caps to obtain cups of coffee from the other end of the store?

I would be much more interesting if Starbucks bought the retailer and opened scaled down stores that mostly focused on coffee and periodicals. It would be somehow fitting if Starbucks ended up consuming other kinds of retail - the drug becoming the central thing...

The end of the book store?