At that time, B&N was the big bad soul-crushing superstore chain killing indy Mom-and-Pop bookstores.

Later, Amazon beat down Barnes & Noble. Yes, the same technology that brought the characters of “You’ve Got Mail” together flattened B&N.

On the Decoder Ring podcast: slate.com/transcrip…

The reality is even more complicated than Decoder Ring portrays. B&N and Borders brought books by the tens of thousands to places that were previously bookstore deserts. Pre-B&N, if you grew up in the suburbs, as I did, or in rural America, your bookstore options were a few sad B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in malls, and that’s it, unless you shlepped into a major metropolitan area.

As a teen and into my 20s, I used to love to go to the mall to browse the four shelves of science fiction and fantasy books at the local bookstores. The B&N SF/F section was bigger than the entire previous bookstore.

And a number of factors, not just the Internet, contribute to retail decline: Retail space was overextended, retail chains engaged in fancy financial hijinks. And consumers just don’t view shopping as a recreational activity as much as they used to.