But these days, so it was said, it was easier, cheaper--more fun--to shop online. A computer could read your taste better than you could. One click could bring you the world, radically discounted.

Just as Amazon.com was getting going, a large store called Borders came into the small town and set up a three-story emporium at its central intersection. This new palace sold CDs and boasted aisles full of magazines and cookies and coffee; thousands of books were sold at vastly marked-down prices; and it used the cozy chairs and community air of a neighborhood store to crafty corporate advantage.

But a few years later, to everyone's surprise, the huge citadel of books, next to a free, multistory parking lot and a five-screen cinema in downtown Santa Barbara, closed. Just one week before, on the last day of 2010, the sprawling Barnes & Noble bookstore across the street from it, in the chicest mall downtown, had also shut its doors. Then the Borders near the town's large public university closed.

Online retailers and e-readers had become ubiquitous. But the little bookstore called Chaucer's kept growing and growing, housing more books--150,000 and counting--in its overcrowded aisles than the central megastore had carried in a space six times as big.

How could this happen? Well, 24 of Chaucer's 26 employees work there full time, many of them for more than 10 years. They have an investment in the concern that the part-time workers in big-box bookstores usually do not.