The superstore was a rare innovation in the sleepy business of bookselling. The prime mover was Barnes & Noble, which began shaking up book retailing back in the mid-1970s with unheard-of notions like discounting and TV ads. Barnes & Noble's No. 1 competitor is Borders, which began as a single store in Ann Arbor, Mich., with a quirky staff and an innovative inventory system. The superstore concept only took off in the 1990s, but today Barnes & Noble has 450 of them and is opening new ones at the rate of 90 per year. Borders has 150.

These stores are big (25,000 square feet, typically), carry huge inventories (150,000-plus titles), discount heavily (20% to 30%), and sport amenities like armchairs, library tables, and coffee bars. They sponsor poetry readings and talks by authors. They stay open late. In some places they've become cultural oases; in others, they're singles' scenes.

Some of the critics of the superstores are small-store patrons; some of their griping is sentimentalism. In New York City over the past two years, the illuminati have bemoaned the closings of favorite neighborhood stores as the superstores moved in, as well as the disappearance of several swank old bookstores in midtown Manhattan.

A more serious complaint about superstores comes from publishing-industry insiders: They send back too many unsold books (unlike most businesses, where manufacturers sell products to distributors or retailers outright, publishers ship lots of books, hoping they'll sell, and agree to take back any that don't). The superstores do in fact return more than smaller bookstores, but the book-return average, while up recently, shows no clear trend over the past dozen years. And publishers resist the obvious alternative: progressively deeper discounts over time until the books do sell.

The most frequently heard complaint--made by both small-bookstore owners and publishing types--is also the most specious: that the superstores are only interested in selling a few bestsellers, and hence won't push more obscure books or take chances on newer writers--especially slighting the so-called mid-list of quality but not blockbuster-grade books. All it takes to disprove that one is a visit to a superstore. Barnes & Noble, for instance, lavishly promotes the works of unknown, promising writers, both through in-store displays and things like a seasonal brochure titled 'Discover New Writers.' This summer's 12-page pamphlet included descriptions of 24 fiction and nonfiction titles, including The Undertaking, 'a collection of essays written by poet and undertaker' Thomas Lynch.

In fact, the very thing that makes the superstores attractive to readers is that they have such a bigger selection than small stores (which might stock 10,000 to 20,000 titles). While it's true that small bookstores could always order these books for you--and today you can even buy them online--nowhere else can you actually see them, let alone curl up with them on a sofa.

The 'only a few bestsellers' line of argument sometimes takes people to strange places. One former bookstore owner, quoted in the Arizona Republic, warned: 'The creepy part about this is, you have two giants controlling so much of the market...deciding what the rest of the country will read.' This is a persistent but paranoid view of how markets work. Of course it's the other way around--in the book business as in any business. The superstores want to figure out what their customers want to read.

The advent of the superstore is in fact a perfect example of economic competition in action. These days, the very word 'competition' is often hooked up with a pejorative, such as 'unfair,' 'dog eat dog,' or 'cutthroat.' But competition, as economist Ludwig von Mises once noted, is in fact 'an element of social collaboration, the ruling principle within the social body,' and one of the things that make civilized societies possible. You want to sell books; I want to sell books. In a savage society we fight it out, and one of us dies. We instead compete and see who does a better job.

Better still, the net effect of competition is to make the world richer. Even if a superstore puts small bookstores out of business--even if this leads to a net job loss in a given area--a vastly larger number of people will now be able to buy their books for less. This will leave them with more money with which to buy other goods and services, which will expand the economy in other ways. Society is better off as a result. Indeed, the whole history of capitalism--and of ever-increasing living standards--is the tale of efficient producers putting inefficient ones out of business.