Are Barnes & Noble Founder Len Riggio and His Nemesis Ron Burkle the Only People Who Still Want to Own a Mega-Bookstore?

New York Magazine: "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. ..."