Since the 1970s, the ancient art of bookselling has undergone, by my count, five major upheavals. The time-honored “shop around the corner” has been besieged by the razzle-dazzle of big corporations like Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Costco, which has a metric for book sales that measures palettes and “deletes” with ruthless skill any book that misses its number. Now, I believe, bookselling may be on the edge of another transformation that could actually secure, albeit in updated fashion, links to a cozier past.

The first big change was the arrival of mall stores such as Walden, Dalton , and Crown, which had simple fixtures, a mix of popular and tested titles, and discounting. The stores vastly increased access to books in the sprawling suburbs and focused on turnover instead of personal service to make margins. Independent booksellers devised a good response: The superstore. One of the most famous was, and is, Tattered Cover in Denver, which provided a full range of choice, superb service, and community center amenities like book groups, author visits, and family-friendly settings.

Then, Barnes and Noble, driven by the entrepreneurial ferocity of Len Riggio, made the superstore into a national business defined by supply, price, and buying power, which put big retailers increasingly in command of the terms of trade by charging for placement. Borders, which began as an independent superstore in Ann Arbor, used the first computerized inventory system as its way to grow and was eventually bought by K-Mart, which spun it off as a separate company. It is now second only to Barnes and Noble in scale and has opened stores around the world. In 1995, Amazon made a true breakthrough in the retail experience, providing the sense of nearly infinite supply, deep discounts in price, and easy ordering. It is now the third largest retailer of books and its bargains are still great. But its early folksiness is long gone and Amazon now operates (and behaves) like other corporate behemoths in a variety of ways that affect mainly suppliers.

The rise of Wal-Mart, Costco, and Target were the next wave. They only take books they can predict will work with their customers, buy them in very large numbers and return them immediately for full credit if they miss their assigned sell-rate. Putting a book in these outlets before their sales are proven elsewhere carries a risk of 75 to 90 percent returns in the worst cases.

Meanwhile, the role of the smaller independent bookseller as an overall percentage of book sales has dropped and thousands have closed, in much the same way as moms-and-pops of all kinds are giving in to bigger rivals. Yet the remaining independents are a very hardy and imaginative bunch. There are scores of great stores around the country and one of the best, Northshire in Manchester, Vermont, is this year’s Bookseller of the Year, chosen by Publishers’ Weekly. Recently doubled in size and now managed by Chris Morrow, son of the founders, Ed and Barbara, Northshire is much more than store. It is a major local asset. The best bookstores combine nostalgia for the role books have played in our lives through childhood, school and college, parenting, friendship, love, and even grief with constantly updated supply and service.

So what is next?

I believe that the biggest challenge for booksellers and the publishers that serve them is to create a new pattern for the way books are sold and read. In a fundamental sense, the bookstore needs to be a showroom for a universe of what is available. It must have efficient ways to deliver that information to readers when and in whatever form they ask for it. That is the goal of the Caravan Project, announced this week (of which I am executive director), in which books will be made available simultaneously in five ways: the traditional hardcover or paperback; instant resupply of these through print-on-demand technology; in digital form either in full or in chapters and as audio downloads. Caravan, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, is a demonstration of how this will work involving six leading non-profit publishers (Beacon Press, University of California Press, New Press, University of North Carolina Press, Yale University Press, and The Council on Foreign Relations Press), the wholesaler Ingram, selected Borders stores, and a number of independents. When a reader asks for a book, the seller’s answer should always be, “how do you want it?” Too often, books are hard-to-find or available, say, in a format that isn’t the most attractive in terms of price, size, or portability.

In today’s world, books have to compete with so much else for peoples’ time, that unless they are present when and how the prospective reader wants them, attention will immediately turn elsewhere.

Caravan’s goal is to work with the booksellers which are such vital community assets, places that readers will always enjoy, and make them capable and comfortable with all the ways books are delivered as technologies evolve. I once saw a sign in, of all places, a hotel in the Middle East, that framed for me the way booksellers can help maintain their uniquely important place in the marketplace of ideas and popular destinations: When a customer asks if they have a particular book or can they recommend one, the mantra needs to be “The answer is yes. There is no other answer.” The reader can choose from the menu: hardcover and/or paperback, digital, audio and by chapters, delivered to you in a timely way.

The purpose of Caravan, as its motto makes clear, is “Good Books. Five Ways. Right Now.” With this week’s formal announcement, the Caravan Project now moves on to demonstrating how this new system can make books more available and their distribution more efficient. Wish us luck.

Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos' columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.