Click on any online chain bookstore and you'll most likely find yourself deluged with CDs, videos and tools and hardware, vying for your dollar. And of course, there are the books, conveniently categorized into lists: top seller lists, wish lists, new release lists, holiday lists, offering the best of the best, supposedly.

Click on Labyrinthbooks.com, the online arm of Labyrinth Books at W. 112th between Broadway and Amsterdam, and the most ostentatious element you see is their logo.

There are no bells and whistles at Labyrinthbooks.com; no fancy-schmancy graphics zipping across the screen. Instead, it's a treasure trove of more than 125,000 academic and university press books from A-to-Z in clear, easy-to-read text.

The home page gives you a choice of two locations from which to search, browse and order books. If you'd like to see what titles are currently available in their bookstore, click on "store." Here, featured titles are spotlighted along with new releases arranged alphabetically by subject area, similar to what you would see if you walked through the front doors of the store today.

For bargain hunters, looking for savings of up to 90 percent, the "sale annex" brims with 10,000 titles. With 100 new books added weekly, it's well worth bookmarking. And if the site doesn't have what you are looking for, then email your request and they'll special order it.

Whether you're a philosophy professor looking for the latest monographs on Kierkegaard, or a historian writing a thesis on the Peace of Westphalia, everything a serious scholar could wish for can be found here.

"There's no frivolity here," said Chris Doeblin, co-owner of Labyrinth Books. "You won't find cookbooks, trashy novels, thrillers or self-help books. What you will find are serious books. Recently, we acquired Tendency, a Chinese literary journal edited by poet Huang Beiling, that was confiscated by the Chinese government for its perceived political offensiveness."

For the past 15 years, independent bookstores have tried to stay afloat amid the storm of competition from behemoth chains whose online businesses served to buoy up their bottom lines even further. Meanwhile, the independents, with their knowledgeable staffs and no-frills style, were slowly being drowned out by the competition.

Pleading rising costs and higher overheads due to the tight labor market, the chains are rolling back their discounts and are steadily raising their prices, unbeknownst to consumers, reported The New York Times. This means that buying books at a "discount" in one of the chain online stores is now often more expensive than paying the cover price in a traditional store.

Opposing the unpleasant trend, Labyrinthbooks.com is offering even more books to customers at discounts. In fact, any faculty member of any university either in the U.S. or overseas gets an automatic 10 percent discount on books in the store, and for Columbia that includes faculty as well as staff members, regardless if they shop in the store or online.

Labyrinth is the brainchild of two independent book wholesalers, Christopher Doeblin and Clifford Simms of Great Jones Books Inc. in Yonkers. Under the encouragement of Columbia Provost Jonathan Cole, President George Rupp and a number of faculty members, the store opened in March 1997, in modest surroundings, a mishmash of tables and an eruption of scholarly books. They use floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, unlike other retail outfits whose shelves stop at eye level to gently guide you to buy the latest bestsellers.

Great universities are defined by the intellectual and academic life they foster. That excellence is due in part to their bookstores. Oxford has its Blackwell's, the University of Chicago has the Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Yale had the Old Yale Co-op (the 116-year-old store will close its doors for good this month), and Columbia has Labyrinth Books and now, its cousin online store.

"When people click onto our Web site, we don't want them to be bombarded," said Doeblin. "We're not in the book business so that we can please everyone and sell everything, that's not our goal. We're here to serve the academic community and anyone who wants serious books."

Unlike Amazon.com, which touts the Earth's biggest selection, Labyrinthbooks.com is intent on becoming merely the largest and most comprehensive scholarly bookstore in New York.

So, for all you bibliophiles to whom a night of debauchery means being constantly drunk on books, click on Labyrinthbooks.com for the perfect buzz.