A browser in Barnes and Noble last week

Barnes & Noble, the world's largest chain of bookshops, posted a quarterly loss of $63m (€49m)... Sorry? What's that? You no longer want to be called the world's largest chain of bookshops? Let's start again...
Barnes & Noble, the "leading content, commerce and technology company", posted a 42% increase in quarterly sales from its website, BN.com, last week, but yes, that didn't stop it plunging into the red to the tune of $63m, as sales and profits once again disappointed investors. There's no spinning it: the transition to the new world of e-readers and digital books is taking its toll on the bricks-and-mortar bookselling giant.
Such is the turmoil that the company is battling an attempt by a rebel investor to unseat members of the board, and it has put itself up for sale, saying the stock market undervalues the company and that its founder (and current chairman) Leonard Riggio is considering taking it private.
Meanwhile, the young chief executive at B&N, William Lynch, is only five months into the job, having been promoted from his role in charge of the website to run the whole shebang.
The swirling debates over the future of B&N are in fact debates over the whole future of physical bookstores and physical books, a debate that has become more frenetic as e-book sales have soared.
Amazon launched its Kindle e-reader in 2007, popularising the idea of digital downloads and snatching perhaps 70% of the ebook market, and B&N has its own device, the Nook, now, too.
Meanwhile, Apple's iPad, and the accompanying iBookstore, provides another means of buying and reading the unprinted word, and Google Editions is launching soon, offering e-books that can be read on devices ranging from the desktop in your home to the smartphone in your pocket.
The market for digital downloads of books this year is forecast at about $500m, and Lynch said last week he thought that would turn out to be a "low" estimate. What will become of B&N?
The worry is that the store network will atrophy. In the quarter ended 31 July, on which it just reported, like-for-like sales at its stores were down 2%. The strategy for turning that around relies not on books, the company concedes, but on using the space
to sell more toys and games, cards and
gifts.
Priority one for Lynch is to make B&N a force in online bookselling. It is doing well in the early land-grab, unquestionably. The issue is whether it can ultimately dominate online retailing as it has physical sales of books.
"The window of opportunity is finite," Forrester Research's analyst Sarah Rotman Epps wrote. "Booksellers should learn a lesson from music retailers, which missed the opportunity to differentiate from Apple by leveraging their music-retailing expertise as a competitive differentiator. Instead, music retailers gave Apple the space to learn and acquire the expertise for itself."
Apple is also learning books now, too, and mass-market retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Kmart, also appear to be getting digital religion.
The forthcoming Google Editions, based on the search engine's decade-long project to digitise all the world's books, could act not just as a retailer direct to consumers but also as a wholesaler to independent bookstores and others who want to get into online retailing of e-books.
It is going to be a varied ecosystem, and quite different from the way books are sold on the high street.
And publishers, running a divide-and-rule strategy, love it. They have switched the industry business model right round for the digital era. Instead of wholesaling books at a discount to retailers, publishers are setting the price, and offering only a fixed percentage commission to the retailer.
B&N shares were down after the results were announced. The company tried to pin most of the blame for the missed forecasts and reduced full-year guidance on Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire who is demanding seats on the board in a protest over what he says is the cosy and complacent rule of the Riggios.
B&N last year paid $514m to buy a college bookstore chain owned by Riggio when, Burkle said, it should have been focusing on its digital strategy instead of doubling down in bricks and mortar.
The speed with which the company scales back the size of its bookstore chain, or fills it with gifts and games, will be up for perennial and furious debate whoever wins the proxy battle. Because, of course, these are early days for e-books. Who can say yet what we will be reading books on in 10 years' time.