Most business shut down because they don't reinvent themselves. If you continue to do what you have been doing you will become obsolete.

Bookstores need to find new model of keeping their customers.

Also its not the online competition but also the pirated books market, where you can find all the NY best sellers at a very cheap price on the streets of India. Students don't buy textbooks but xerox them from seniors or infact there are some shops where they offer to create copies of such highly recommended textbooks for a fraction of the price.

I have purchased 100's of books most of them because while flipping them I happen to stumble upon a paragraph or quite which reasonated with me or the table of contents seem to contain what I was eager to learn.

Amazon offers that with their quick look feature.

Only thing I hated about offline bookstores was that I had to tilt my neck sideways to read the title of these books.