The business model differs from that of traditional video rental stores that typically let customers pick movies from an available physical library of titles.

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Quite: my own opinion is that, probably around the time of the death of my own generation which grew up only with physical books, the library and the bookshop will be as dead as those physical books.

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"The physical part went to the Library of Congress, which is important to them, but we don't need it anymore, " Mr. Fleming said.

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For the library exists to provide those physical books: it comes to us from a time when the publication of a book was an expensive business.

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Muneaki Masuda (No. 38), since taking his book store chain private in 2011, has been expanding physical locations, and even took over running his first public library.

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Stites said Monticello's keepers don't want to get caught up in the political debates about gun control, but there is a lot of community interest in Jefferson's real and falsely attributed quotations, so Jefferson Library researchers provide resources based on searches through electronic and physical archives of Jefferson's writings.

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Speaking to GigaOM, Redbox Instant CEO Shawn Strickland said his product's focus remains movies -- both physical and digital -- which differs from Netflix's TV-heavy library and emphasis on web content.

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The British Library estimates that it costs half as much to store a digital document as it does a physical one.

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