In the Shadow of the Giants, endangered booksellers are struggling to master the art of survival. Forget the issue of whether people are actually reading more. The real question is this: Where do you buy your books? When Nation publisher Victor Navasky admitted a few years ago in the pages of The New York Times that he got most of his at Barnes & Noble, he caused an uproar among the literati that raged for weeks. An intellectual patronizing a bookstore chain? The debate has shifted slightly in the short time since he wrote, if only because the superstore chains in one guise or another (Barnes & Noble, Borders, Crown Books, Books-A-Million) have proliferated since then, and traditional bookselling venues--independently owned bookshops--have become less numerous. Fierce jostling for store space characterizes the retail end of the business, and this despite a dropoff in book sales since last year, following four years of rapid growth.

Though liking the superstores is still a dirty secret in many circles, finding other places to shop becomes harder and harder to do. Sales at large chains now account for 25.6 percent of the books sold in this country, with 18.6 percent credited to the independents and small chains, according to the Book Industry Study Group. The shift has been so steady and precipitous that the little guys have lately earned the epithet 'endangered.'

For bibliophiles, of course, there should be nothing more appealing than coming across a bookstore every few blocks. But this is not the case. People are anxious about the superstores fulfilling their 'category killer' designation. They are concerned about the biggest chains fighting each other to the death, until only one is left and just a scant handful of powerful buyers will prevail, deciding from one central location what books will be stocked each season on bookstore shelves throughout the country. The stores will be filled only with best-sellers (a category description rather than an indication of sales), celebrity bios, and self-improvement books. Any semblance of literature will be a thing of the past.

Will the future really be as bleak as this worst-case scenario? It's a picture that pops up in conversation after conversation with independent booksellers around the country. The possiblity that this could happen is palpable to them, as it is to the larger community that continues to read books and celebrate the diversity that has been the hallmark of America's publishing history. The fear is so real that a few communities thus far untouched by Borders, Barnes & Noble, and the other chains have risen up to fight back the uninvited giants. On the surface, the protests have been about other issues--traffic congestion, historic preservation, environmental endangerment--but the subtext in each case is about what is seen as a frightening trend toward cultural homogenization and intellectual impoverishment, and the losses that follow in their wake.