Would you also argue that these small bookstores “delight their users”? If so, why aren’t they making money? If not, do you think that maybe that might be the problem?

The way that amazon has delighted their users, for a long time, was to heavily grow by reinvesting all their money into both expansion and subsidizing their infrastructure. That is simply not a path a small shop can take because they don't have investors. Nor do they it want to. Nor should they have to.

> Nor do they it want to. Nor should they have to.

Then they need to do something that cannot be scaled. Being a general bookseller can easily be scaled.

No, I don't think that's the problem, at least not for all. From the limited insight into the publishing industry I have it seems fairly obvious that the fact that Amazon can demand massively lower prices from the publishing houses, while at the same time being able to have more optimized logistics, access to better shipping conditions, ... thanks to scale, plays a large role.

Was that also the case when Amazon started? How did they get to scale? And are we arguing that Barnes and Noble didn’t have scale when Amazon started competing with them. If “scale = success”, how is it that the former incumbents failed and the initially small startup succeeded?

How is "Barnes and Noble" relevant to "small bookstores" and "small businesses"?