It works like this: 1) "Oh, look! A bookstore! I love books! Let's go look at it!" 2) "This is a great book. I think I'll buy it. How much is... TWENTY NINE FUCKING DOLLARS? Surely it's not the same every..." 3) "Huh. Amazon has it for thirteen. This place is cool but it isn't worth paying more than double for this book." It's a publishing problem: monopolies are always more efficient than a diverse market and Amazon has a monopoly on online booksales (go ahead and quibble - it's a de facto monopoly). Publishers aren't about to favor brick'n'mortar because Amazon will crush them and the capitalist system favors giant, unregulated monopolies. You'll note every single person decrying the "death of books" is someone who has gotten fat'n'happy not because of writing but because of publishing and publishing is experiencing its greatest upheaval since the Gutenberg Press.
If your local bookstore is awesome, keep giving them money. Buy used books; I'll bet they make double the money on used books that they do on new (you could always ask them). I worked at a book store for four years in high school, spending 4pm to close four nights a week and all day sunday surrounded by books. That store just closed four months ago, having been open for 25 years; the guys I worked for had the sense to sell out in 2005 when they saw the writing on the wall, though. They'd already switched over from "bookstore" to "gift shop" and although they loved books, trinkets made more money. If I haven't made it clear, I very much value "books as objects." I think there remains a hell of a future for them. For my part I'd love to see "book binding" becoming a thing again - since we're print-on-demand, why not have your work leather-bound on 25lb vellum for an extra $50? But at the same time, I stopped seeing paper-and-glue as the best medium for the transmission of knowledge. There is, has been and shall always be a very visceral difference between flipping pages and staring at a screen. Yet I'll bet if you could have asked the pulp publishers of the '20s and '30s if they'd prefer a paper or Kindle ecosystem, they would have gone Kindle all the way.
I'm curious, have you decided how you're going to publish/distribute the novel you're working on?
It's a bitch. On the one hand I know a few people who are making 10-20k a month self-publishing. I'm aware that a "Reddit audience" exists for anything I write (ahh, but how big is it? And how much do they care?). I'm aware that going through Kindle on my own will make me 33 cents on the dollar, while going through Penguin will make me ten. I'm in the best possible shape to self-publish, considering everything. On the other hand I have the endorsement and the enlisted help of a NYT bestselling author. I have a friend whose wife sold "Devil Wears Prada" and five or six similar-sized books and projects. I have had contacts with publishers and agents at obscenely high levels compared to anyone else on this journey and I recognize that "bidding war" trumps the shit out of "nickels and dimes through Amazon." I recognize that it is a deeply enviable position. I also recognize that I need a book first, so I'm focusing on "writing it" rather than "selling it."