Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Let’s be clear: B&N hasn’t ignored its stores. In fact, it has done a pretty good job of integrating the Nook into the physical locations. The counter where customers buy a Nook is front and center when they walk in. Customers who already have a Nook can read a larger selection of E-books for free when they’re in a B&N store than when they’re outside.

In fact, B&N’s stores have become the best remaining showroom for the Nook, which was a reasonably strong number-two among E-readers but tanked horribly when the general-purpose tablet wave hit. At Staples (NASDAQ:SPLS), Office Depot (NYSE:ODP) or Best Buy, the Nook has to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad and the endless supply of Android tablets. Inside a B&N store, there’s no competition.

Apple figured out the store-as-showroom advantage more than a decade ago. That’s why Apple has stores. It’s not just that Apple had a hard time getting retail shelf space in a crowded PC retail environment, though that

was certainly a problem in Apple’s pre-iPhone and iPad days. But once customers were inside an Apple store, they were in an environment that was all about Apple. Although it’s hard to ban competitors’ Web sites (who’s going to confiscate customers’ phones at the door?), a competitor’s Web site has a hard time competing with a really good in-store experience.

The Nook strategy was supposed to be a miniature version of that: an E-reader that was also a retailer-controlled E-book store that could replace all that square footage. B&N’s E-books are still selling, but not Nooks. The single-channel Nook strategy is a bust.

For B&N, that mainly leaves the parts of the business that Riggio wants to buy—the can’t-beat-Amazon dot-com and the showroom physical stores. Arguably, the chain’s only real advantage over

Amazon is that it has those showroom stores—places where customers are surrounded by buying opportunities in a 3D retail environment, where associates can have access to every shred of CRM data available and also do actual person-to-person selling.

Those showrooms, done right, should be able to take away almost every reason for showrooming, and compensate for the rest. No wonder Riggio believes they’re the part of the business he wants to own.

If there’s a lesson in all this for other showrooming-plagued chains, it might be that too many are still really thinking as single-channel retailers—which is just as deadly if the channel is physical stores as it is if the channel is all-digital.

Or maybe it’s something simpler: Dot-com competitors don’t have expensive showroom stores. If you’re a chain, you do—and you’d better use that advantage for everything it’s worth.