Actually, I do have some barcode app that indeed does all the work for me and brings back prices and availability on anything across the web. In all honesty, I mostly just rely on my good olde-fashioned wetware to remember the books I want.
Coffee shop works fine, though I'm not convinced whether it translates into sales of anything but coffee. Coffee, tbh, is probably far mure lucrative that books.
According to the internet, Waterstones do offer some kind of browse-and-download service, but considering I've been hanging around in Waterstones for several years, it's news to me. Which again is the problem. Despite spending a long time in their stores, I don't know how to buy ebooks from them or if I can read them. That's a fail.
Businesses didn't learn much from Apple decimating the music industry, in the much the same way, bookshops and publishers owned the space and yet they let Amazon march in take everything, while they still wittered on about the NBP, totally missing the point that the threat was somewhere else.