In the long run, most book stores are doomed. There's no way around it no matter how nostalgic some are for physical books - the medium is an obsolete novelty with the advent of smartphones/tablets. Some book stores will remain but it'll be a niche thing like vinyl records and horseback riding.
This common prediction has not at all been borne out by facts. Physical books still remain popular -- maybe not as popular as thirty years ago, but there's a lot of reasons why that would be the case (general availability of entertainment from competing media). Most importantly, there was a 2017 study that showed that young children prefer reading physical books to reading books electronically.
Physical books have been with us much longer, culturally speaking, than vinyl records were. We're talking millennia. It's going to take much more than the iPad to kill them off.
The eInk device is a better comparison, and according to research(1) it's comparable in most ways to paper reading, but it has some problems with helping people maintain chronological order.
I don't know anyone who reads significant numbers of books on smartphone/tablets. It's either print books, ebooks, or audiobooks. And looking at print book sales over the last decade, there hasn't been a consistent downwards trend.
Personally, I like to buy print books because I can give them away to friends or family after I read them. I also get a lot of print books from my local library, because there's nearly always less of a wait than for ebooks, due to the obnoxious DRM/copyright terms that ebooks for libraries entail.
The combination of form-factor and genre makes a huge difference in how I consume books.
For instance, I have no trouble reading most fiction on either my Kindle or my phone - I'm reading through in a linear fashion, and there usually isn't much besides text. I usually don't have to hold every detail in my head, and can just flow along.
If I get into non-fiction, that is usually where I switch over to either print, or failing that, reading on my computer. Sometimes I can get by with my large-format Kindle DX clone, but that can be dicey. With non-fiction, there is usually a lot more paging back and forth; I may be reading a paragraph, and want to go back and double-check a map or table of figures, or re-read a section that I didn't grok the first time. There might also be footnotes or endnotes that one wants to skip to, and the experience isn't great in most reading apps. It's also considerably easier to read non-fiction on a larger screen or a textbook-size physical copy, I find - for instance, any kind of programming book usually has large blocks of code listings, and looking at those on a 27" 1080p monitor or a physical book where I can see the whole thing at full size, on two facing pages, is much easier than on a 5" phone screen.
Personally, I have read a few thousand books but I have not bought a physical book for myself in years.
When I ride the subway and I see a lot of people reading on devices and relatively few books. Book sales seem to be propped up by gifts, where regular readers love the convenience.
This is especially true of older readers who love being able to increase the fount size.
