We were driving home from our Thanksgiving visit on Friday (we stayed in our friend Mary’s condo overlooking Lake Michigan) and stopped to buy a book for our 12-year-old son, Alex, at a Barnes & Noble store near Madison, WI. This kid reads all the time. And fast. He had already gone through the books he brought in the car on Wednesday afternoon—and the movies, too, which he watched on my laptop as we drove (passing and being passed by other cars/vans/SUV’s, it seemed like every one of them had a screen of some kind glowing in the back seat).
Once inside Barnes & Noble, our 18-year-old daughter Biz made a beeline to the music section where she bought two CD’s. In the car a few minutes later, she felt frustrated that she couldn’t hear her CD’s right away. She wished she could have just plugged into something at the store and downloaded the music to her iPod. Instead, she has to wait until she gets home, then download from her laptop.
I thought Biz had come up with a great idea about buying, then downloading at retail. Retailers like Barnes & Noble, Target and Apple should consider creating a Download Bar for all the people who, like Biz, are big buyers of music and movies and always have their iPod with them.