Barnes & Noble and occasionally

"A bookstore is like an oasis, in a sense," says Sharonrose Francisco of Chicago, who favors Borders, but also shops at Barnes & Noble and occasionally at Amazon. "I love being surrounded by books."vanzari auto

Yet, Deutsche Bank analyst Dave Weiner notes that online bookselling still commands an edge over big-box bookstores and will continue to exert financial pressure on Borders and others.vanzari auto

"You're definitely seeing the market shift from the bricks-and-mortar guys to the online players," Weiner says. "The simple reason is that books are commodities, and superstores charge more. What is happening and will continue to happen is you're going to see prices at superstores come down."vanzari auto

Borders' Rob Gruen, executive vice president of marketing and merchandising, concedes that while stores are becoming more competitive on price, the physical stores can seldom match Amazon's pricing. "Customers," he says, "come to us not because of price."

Besides, Jones says of Amazon, "If you look at what they do, it isn't like they discount everything."

Some independent booksellers say they're managing well, too.vanzari auto

"The kinds of people who go to bookstores like to interact with other people who go to bookstores," says Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, which represents about 250 bookstores. "You can't reproduce that online, and many people feel you can't reproduce it in a chain store. It's big and impersonal."

Annie Philbrick, co-owner of independent Bank Square Books in Mystic, Conn., says her store struggles against Amazon discounts of 45% or more. She'd lose money on a book, she calculates, if she offered a discount of more than 42%.

Landon suggests that Amazon's splash into the book retail market has leveled out and that the most robust independent stores will survive. More than 100 independents have opened nationwide in the past three years, he says.

Yet, the major chains wield an advantage in technology. By the end of April, Borders plans to launch its own website and take back control of Borders.com from Amazon, which has been operating the Borders site for nearly seven years. Under the arrangement, orders on Borders' website are filled by Amazon with Amazon's inventory and staff. Amazon gets credit for the sales, though Borders gets a percentage it won't disclose.vanzari auto

Once this change is completed, the interactive kiosks in Borders' stores will allow customers to do more online shopping in a store and even buy books, if they prefer.

Because it can't rely only on retired bibliophiles to carry sales into the future, Jones is betting that the changes will attract new, younger customers who are interested in music, movies and books.

A 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that the proportion of 18-to-24-year-olds who had read a book in 2002 was 52%, compared with 59% for the 35-to-44-year-old group.vanzari auto

While some older adults may have little interest in owning a digital music player, Jones says others may have gotten them as gifts but don't know how to use them. Still others lack time to navigate websites to put music on their players.

Jones, 57, says he falls into the latter category. "I'm an old guy," he says. Having a trained staff ready to help, he figures, will appeal to people like him.

While the move to digital has been fastest in music, Borders is applying the technology to books, too. It teamed with Sony during the last holiday season to launch a website selling 25,000 e-books that can be read on the Sony Reader Digital Book, which costs $299.vanzari auto

The Reader competes with Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, which lets users wirelessly download books, newspapers and magazines from Amazon without having to connect to or pay for a separate digital device. At Borders' new digital centers, customers will be able to download books to read on the 9-ounce Sony readers.

Landon, of the independent booksellers' group, has a different view. "I don't think that people who work on computers all day long want to go home and read a computer screen," he says.vanzari auto