I prefer paper books and record players to digital books and iPods. I’m fond of the first item because it allows me to annotate words in any way I wish, and my second inclination comes from being drawn to objects with longer histories.

But I’m far from the typical millennial.

In the digital age, more and more consumers are running to the latest and greatest innovations because of the associated efficiencies, among other reasons, and the result for banks is a massive challenge in keeping pace with consumer preferences.

But banks should find comfort (and good advice) from those industries that have already been further through the fire of digital era transformation.

Take book publishing. Ongoing lessons learned from the print world were highlighted in an article published yesterday by The New York Times about Barnes & Noble, and banks should take note of the book publisher’s struggle. Book publishing and banking aren’t totally analogous in their disintermediation journeys — a theme that Aite analyst Ron Shevlin explores in a blog post published today — but there are still pointers to take in.

Julie Bosman from the news source reports:

“No one expects Barnes & Noble to disappear overnight. The worry is that it might slowly wither as more readers embrace e-books. What if all those store shelves vanished, and Barnes & Noble became little more than a cafe and a digital connection point?”

The piece later describes how its chief executive, William J. Lynch, is battling the challenge of becoming a relic. 

“With all of three years of experience in bookselling, Mr. Lynch must pull off a balancing act that would be tricky even in good times. He must carve out a digital future for Barnes & Noble without forsaking its hard-copy past, all while his company’s profit and share price are under pressure, his customers are fleeing to the Web and Amazon is circling.”

Like Barnes & Noble, banks are already facing a similar struggle, especially as new entrants keep popping up in the financial services space. In banking, there’s been a renaissance of innovation from outside players in the past few years, which poses danger to banks’ relevance with consumers. The underlying theme of the NY Times article points to how the bookstore must “adapt to new realities, or die trying” – a lesson that banks must remember, too, especially as the undercurrent sentiment toward banks is ambivalent at best and hostile at worst. If consumers get better options, they’ll take them — even if I don’t.