Are Barnes & Noble founder Len Riggio and his nemesis Ron Burkle the only people in America who still want to own a mega-bookstore?

In mid-June, six weeks before he put his company and his legacy on the block, Leonard Riggio was sitting on the top floor of Barnes & Noble’s Flatiron headquarters, facing down the relentless forces of obsolescence. “I still like books,” he said, though it didn’t really need saying. All around him, in a conference room that evoked an elegant old library, were shelves lined with hardbound classics. Books had made Riggio a fortune. For decades, he had been delivering them to consumers at monumental scale in his ubiquitous superstores, a strategy that won him more fear than love in the world of publishing but made him arguably its most powerful player. Books had been very good to him, and now they were dissolving into the ether.

The founder, chairman, and guiding spirit of the company that calls itself the “world’s largest bookseller” is a slight, mustachioed 69-year-old with a Napoleonic temperament. But when he talks about books he fills with sentimentality. Riggio wanted to say something, but he couldn’t quite find the words, so he burst out of his chair and charged over to one wall. “I don’t know how you can intellectualize this,” he said, “but a book is …” To continue his thought, he pulled down a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, shook it, felt its substance. “This bound volume of Dumas is content. We have to understand people want to own this content. They want this. It’s very important.”

Riggio was trying to say that, whatever becomes of books as physical objects in this new age of digital distribution, he is certain people will still pay for the pleasure of reading. Assuming he’s right, the more pertinent question is whether they will be spending their money at a Barnes & Noble. Sales numbers are down, and the company is valued at a third of what it was worth four years ago. If it is to avoid the fates of Tower Records and Blockbuster, it will have to figure out how to compete in a world where prices are falling and nimble competitors like Amazon and Apple are offering in actuality what the superstore bookseller used to promise only figuratively: immediate, cheap, and limitless selection.