Amazon Preparing Bid for Barnes & Noble?

There's been a lot of buzz about who will make a bid for Barnes & Noble, with the current rumors including Wal-Mart and Microsoft. Both companies had kicked the tires in the past, and so it seems reasonable to expect they'd look again. But the real player in the space — and in some ways the most strategic buyer — would be Amazon.com, for a number of reasons that reflect the changing business of brick-and-mortar retail and Amazon's evolution.