Before I talk about how physical and online bookstores live in rather complicated symbiosis - partly because I buy and read books in multiple languages, and partly because I have no access to all my favorite physical bookstores - I have to say that as a general rule I prefer electronic books to paper ones.
This might lead automatically to my preference for online bookstores, as I can't buy electronic books at physical bookstores. But I love the latter much more than the former for a very simple reason - I can experience far more unexpected encounters with books I didn't know existed by walking through any physical bookstore. I even felt many times that such books "found" me, so to speak, instead of my finding them.
Some online bookstores, including Amazon, do recommend related books on the basis of our browsing history, but they can't recommend books we ourselves didn't know might interest us. In this respect, I don't think even the best generative AI can help such books "find" us in the way they "find" us directly at physical bookstores.
Where I've been living since October 2023, I visit two huge local bookstores every week, mainly to browse new books. If I find interesting books, I generally buy them as electronic copies from online bookstores. And many of the books I find interesting are translations of English originals into the local language, so I acquire the originals.
In this new place I've bought very few physical books at local physical bookstores for a very simple reason: they don't sell those books I need or want as physical copies. They are either Chassidic books in Hebrew, English or Russian, or Russian books for Russian sociocultural literacy.
But I have to mention one special exception. In the capital of the country where I live now there is a physical bookstore that imports and sells Russian books. In the past three years I've bought about 20 such Russian books from there. When I visited this physical bookstore last November, I also got acquainted with its owner. Since then we've been corresponding by email almost on a daily basis about various topics, including not only Russian books and Russian (book) culture but also geopolitics and geoeconomics.
This has made me realize that another important benefit of physical bookstores, though probably such specialized ones, is the existence of fellow book lovers who are familiar with books they are "matchmaking" with their customers. I also have three such physical bookstores in Jerusalem, and I miss them and the "matchmakers" there most in Jerusalem.
Website
Блог на русском
DeepL (probably the best machine translation available now)