It's hard to see this piece as more than a disrupted industry, frankly, whining over their diminished power in the new reality. I'm to believe that it's bad for anyone but publishers that books are cheap? Because people might buy books for the wrong reasons? Oh, humanity. ("it sends a confusing message that good books are worth less, and because it encourages buying based on something other than the quality of the book")

This bit is particularly disingenuous: "The hippie, black and women’s movements of the 1960s would not have been so successful in challenging authority without the bookstores, which made their ideas widely available and sympathetic in a way that television, for instance, did not."

Seriously? I mean, really, seriously, you just wrote that on a technology (wait for it) BLOG? The analogous movements of today has unprecedented access to spreading their ideas through blogs and websites and social media and petition sites and collaboration services and who knows what else - most of it available instantly and almost or entirely free. I don't think that if the occupy/tea party/anonymous/truther/conspiracy/pick-your-revolution-of-week movements have struggled for five minutes to make their ideas available, it was because of the lack of bookstores.