For me, the only downside of Amazon’s growth has been the demise of the browsing function at physical bookstores as these disappear. There is no recommendation system or electronic sampling system I’ve seen that approaches the discovery potential of being able to physically browse volumes.
In principle, a sufficiently nimble (and unencumbered by publishers’ copyright paranoia) interface could allow a virtual shelf that approximates the ability to pick up, peruse, and see the neighbors of a book on a physical bookshelf. In practice, on those rare occasions when I do visit a physical store I end up finding and buying (or occasionally showrooming) way more books than I ever do online. Just try the exercise of looking online at the index of a book to see how it treats some item you know about or are curious about, skimming those passages, looking at another item, seeing who blurbed it, reading the author’s credentials, etc. It is so clunky (and often blocked by missing pages not made available for sampling) compared to the meat-space alternative that it is easy to give up.
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