Yesterday on NPR‘s Morning Edition, Barnes and Noble CEO Len Riggio may have made a bit of news (though we’ve been anticipating this for some time) when he told Lynn Neary the following:

“We really don’t care if someone has an iPhone, because you can read Barnes & Noble e-books on your iPhone,” he says. “You can read Barnes & Noble books on your iPad or your BlackBerry. So we don’t consider the other devices to be competitive, and we may very well sell some of those devices in our stores.”

In a story that was ostensibly about the comeback of indies and the decline of chains, Neary profiled two indie bookstores–Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY, and Book Passage in San Francisco, CA–who have figured out ways to survive and thrive in this new era of change.

Summing up her view of the landscape in the wake of the digital wave, Greenlight co-owner Jessica Stockton Bagnulo told Neary that:

“The potential is for there to be two trends,” she explains. “Digital content — which is ubiquitous and everywhere — and the local, boutique, curated side. And the chain stores unfortunately don’t have the advantage in either of those areas. I mean, they can’t carry every book in the world in their store, and they don’t have the same emotional connection to their neighborhood that a local store does.”

The solution for the chains then is to sell (and/or make) something else. In B&N’s case, the Nook.

Though Riggio doesn’t come right out and say he expects the Nook to put many of their brick-and-mortar stores out of business, it’s not hard to read between the lines. Clearly, B&N believes on some level that Bagnulo is correct. If the arrival of gadget-display tables devoted to the Nook and Nook Color–replacing shelf space in their own stores–isn’t evidence enough, I’m not sure what is. I guess now even more shelves are about to disappear in order to make room for tablets and e-readers made by other companies.

When asked about the other recent big development in e-books (i.e. the Google ebookstore) Elaine Petrocelli, co-owner of Bookpassage, told Neary “I think it gives us a chance…I don’t think it’s a panacea, but I think it gives us a chance.”

But Petrocelli saved her best line for Amazon’s Kindle. Describing Amazon’s restrictive approach to e-book ownership, she said, “I think that it’s possible that the Kindle could turn into the Betamax.”