Independent bookstores in university towns serve a function that transcends retail. They are gathering places, intellectual watering holes, and community anchors. Printers Inc. filled this role in Palo Alto for years, hosting readings, recommending books to regular customers, and providing the kind of curated browsing experience that algorithms would later attempt to replicate digitally. The store's staff knew their inventory and their customers, two advantages that chain stores and online retailers could not match and that also could not be scaled.

The early 1990s brought chain bookstores to suburban America. Borders and Barnes & Noble offered selection that small independents could not match, along with comfortable seating and espresso bars that turned book-buying into an experience. For independent stores operating on thin margins, the competition was devastating. Printers Inc. was not alone in its struggle -- independent bookstores across the country were closing at an alarming rate. The rise of Amazon.com added a second existential threat: why drive to any store when every book ever published could be delivered to your door?

The closing of Printers Inc. in Palo Alto -- the city where so much of the technology disrupting retail was being created -- carried a particular irony. The software engineers and entrepreneurs who were building the internet economy were also losing their local bookstore to it. The community protest against the closing was genuine, but it could not change the fundamental economics. Printers Inc. became an early casualty of the retail transformation that would eventually claim Borders itself and reshape how Americans buy books, music, and most everything else.