Barnes & Noble, in the Fight of Its Life

PALO ALTO, Calif. A magazine display at a Barnes & Noble store. The company's C.E.O. says the idea that e-readers will make bookstores obsolete is nonsense. In March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim with glee or dread will go the way of vinyl records. No, the engineers were instead fixated on the forces that are upending the way books are published,