"You have to be pretty mean to say that kind of thing about another human being," Riggio says plaintively. "But it seems like civility has been replaced with a clenched fist. From the things they write about me, you would think I wake up in the morning thinking about who I am going to kill. I wake up looking to do some good! We are selling books. We aren't selling weapons of mass destruction. You go into a bookstore, you see Len Riggio's life's work, and you say, 'Not a bad lifetime of work'; then you read this stuff, and you think that I am at war all the time! Twenty years ago, we opened a new bookstore at Columbia University, and the Times wrote death of a bookstore. And it's never stopped!"

Riggio once called New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to complain personally about a conspicuous error, and then followed up the Times' correction with a further clarification of his own in the form of a full-page ad. "How can you do a full-page story and then a one-sentence correction?" Riggio says.

Some of Riggio's Italian-American friends feel he is the victim of ethnic bias in the publishing industry. "I went into those little shops, and I was badly treated," says the author Gay Talese. "They were stuffy and intimidating. But Len Riggio is the name now, this devouring demon eating up all these wonderful neighborhood bookshops."

Nora Ephron used the conflict between the superstores and the independents as the basis for her 1998 movie You've Got Mail. As she prepared for production, Kurt Andersen (the novelist and former editor of this magazine) and Riggio's friend Tibor Kalman helped broker a meeting between Riggio and Ephron at a small dinner at the downtown restaurant Verbena. Ephron hoped Riggio would let the film crew shoot at a Barnes & Noble store, but he worried the movie was a thinly veiled and critical portrait of himself. "Believe me," she told him at the end of the meal, "if I had wanted to model it after you, I would have cast John Travolta instead of Tom Hanks."

Riggio laughed but declined to cooperate. "He isn't stupid," Ephron says. "He is very sensitive, and very defensive about the impact of his stores. You don't even have to say anything and he's already defending himself."

Riggio's superstores, for better or worse, have changed the book business as profoundly as anything since the advent of the paperback. The company's more than 520 superstores and 465 smaller B. Dalton stores now sell nearly one in every eight trade books sold in the U.S. Barnes & Noble has nearly a quarter of the bookstore market, where almost all literary fiction and serious nonfiction is sold.

For independent bookstores, the facts are grim. Despite Barnes & Noble's argument that its superstores have expanded the market for books, the number of copies of adult trade books sold in the U.S. has grown in the past ten years at a rate of less than one percent annually. During that time, the number of Barnes & Noble superstores has grown from a handful to more than 500, tripling the amount of shelf space devoted to selling books in some markets. Unlike mall chains, Barnes & Noble and its rival Borders invaded the urban centers and college towns -- the independents' turf -- and small stores folded in droves. Membership in the independent stores' American Booksellers Association fell from 5,500 in 1994 to 3,400 in 1999.

"It seems like civility has been replaced with a clenched fist. From the things they write about me, you would think I wake up in the morning thinking about who I am going to kill."

Barnes & Noble's phenomenal growth has put publishers in a tight spot and hastened their consolidation. Like suppliers in many other industries, publishers were accustomed to being much bigger than the stores that sold their books, giving publishers the upper hand when they negotiated contracts with booksellers over variables like wholesale book prices and who pays shipping costs. Now, however, the power belongs to the giant retailers. "The advent of the superstores makes publishing much riskier, because the buyers at one of the giant chains have a big say in the initial success of a book," says David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster's trade-books division. And book publishers' race to merge, partly to match the booksellers' clout, gives just a few people ever more say over what books get pushed.