The bookstore business had a bad twenty years.
Borders liquidated completely. Barnes and Noble closed hundreds of locations and eventually sold itself. Thousands of independents shut.
The story everyone tells is that the internet did it, which is true and incomplete.
Because there is a chain headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama that came through the same period, went private, and is still operating hundreds of stores.
It is not in the cities where the famous bookstores were. It is in Tupelo and Dothan and towns of that size across the South.
Which is the first clue. The chain that survived was the one nobody was paying attention to, in places nobody was writing about.