RIP Borders Bookstore

[ArtRosen]

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/borders-faces-liquidation-after-takeover-bids-rejectionthe-borders-group-was-dealt-a-potentially-lethal-blow-on-wednesday-when-a-committee-of-its-unsecured-creditors-rejected-a-proposed-takeover-by/?smid=tw-nytimes&s

Sad to see it go. Used to go the one locally to pick up books and magazines all the time. Seems like the new frontier of publishing is on the ipad/tablet.

[Robert Brummitt]

I stopped using Borders for Barnes and Noble and soon my IPad. But, only if the publisher lower the price. So far I don't see that happening.

[Ken Lee]

First, the printing press. Now, the Internet. When will it ever end ? :rolleyes:

[Robert Brummitt]

First, the printing press. Now, the Internet. When will it ever end ? :rolleyes:

The Matrix!!!

[Greg Blank]

You laugh.


The Matrix!!!

[ArtRosen]

It's official!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/18/borders-liquidation-idUSN1E76H1LQ20110718

[dsphotog]

Rats! I bought the Borders discount club membership!

[Ed Richards]

Back in the early 70s I shopped at the original Borders in Ann Arbor while in grad school. I wonder if it is gone already, or will survive this as an independent store?

I think this was inevitable. In Baton Rouge, a small, not particularly intellectual city, we had two Barnes and Noble stores and a Borders not 1/2 mile from one of the Barnes and Noble stores. You could see this coming a long time ago when Borders would not match the BN discount plan. Using the discount, BN prices were pretty close to Amazon, while Border's prices were 15-20% higher.

The upside is that in communities with both chains, BN may now have a better chance of surviving. I do try to buy books from them, even if I can get the book cheaper at Amazon, just as I try to subscribe to some print publications so they stay in business. It is a real shame that Congress lets online retailers like Amazon avoid sales taxes. Its hurts the local retailers and the local tax base. Here, that automatically gives Amazon a 9% edge over BN.

Wonder if anyone will publish big photobooks when there are no more stores to ship them to? Will they sell over the Internet when you cannot see and feel them? Or will we just be looking at images on Ipads and other screens?

[Marko]

Wonder if anyone will publish big photobooks when there are no more stores to ship them to? Will they sell over the Internet when you cannot see and feel them? Or will we just be looking at images on Ipads and other screens?

We are already doing that, along with reading. I used to spend hours at a time in those stores, alone or with my kids, and my house is full of books bought there. But it's been a long time since I bought an actual, paper book there or elsewhere. It is simply a technology whose time has come more than 500 years ago and it is now ready to go.

It's been a truly remarkable run as far as technologies go, but I am more concerned about those 11,000 or so people who are going to lose their jobs, the kind that will be the hardest to find again. I can only hope that being smart and educated people by definition, they have a "plan B".

[BarryS]

...it's been a long time since I bought an actual, paper book there or elsewhere. It is simply a technology whose time has come more than 500 years ago and it is now ready to go...

You may no longer have any use for books, but they're around to stay. The full experience of the book has yet to be replicated by any other form of media. Particularly, a well-reproduced book of photographs--one of life's great pleasures.

[Marko]

Barry, you must have read what I said right before what you quoted, in order to select that little snippet and take it so far out of context!

Hand written books sure provided incomparably richer experience back in their day, but Gutenberg's new machine (imagine the outrage among the monks and the nobles of the day!) replaced them in the end. It is now its turn.

I wasn't talking about experience, I am simply analyzing the reality. It is what it is, regardless of whether we like it or not.

[BarryS]

Yes, just like many urban planners of the 60's decided that the sidewalk and the ancient form of the city square were superseded by the automobile and expressways. :rolleyes:

[rdenney]

I'm not sorry to see Border's go. They, along with Barnes and Noble, had become the WalMart of book sales, driving the small, independent stores out of business in most places. Trouble is, books are not like WalMart sundries and those small stores reflected enough of their owners' interests to make browsing fruitful. Browsing in the book supermarkets was more waste of time than anything--they never had the best books on any topic or the best examples from any author. They had too many of what was left after the good stuff sold.

I don't mind my Kindle. It allows me to bring several books on my frequent business trips, and I've been reading through a lot of public-domain books which are no longer economical to print.

There may still be a market for browsing, and if there is, it may be possible for some independents to return.

But it is true that people no longer read books as they once did. Complaining about that is like kicking the dirt. Waste the energy if you want to, but it's not going to change.

Rick "who owns thousands of books and has no place to put more" Denney

[Marko]

Yes, just like many urban planners of the 60's decided that the sidewalk and the ancient form of the city square were superseded by the automobile and expressways. :rolleyes:

It looks more like photography to me... ;)

[jayabbas]

You may no longer have any use for books, but they're around to stay. The full experience of the book has yet to be replicated by any other form of media. Particularly, a well-reproduced book of photographs--one of life's great pleasures.

Yes books certainly are one of life's pleasures and I never needed batteries to read my books. This debate looks, feels, smells sorta like the ever present film vs digital experience -- trad against tech.

[Drew Wiley]

What killed off Borders was an idiotic business model, not e-books. They were in a tailspin well before that. When you have the high overhead of an outlet in every strip
mall just like Starbucks, but undercut your own brick-and-mortar stores by selling on
line too, and cheaper, and then allowing customers to get back more than they paid for the book on line by returning it at the retail store ... duuuh. And when your book selection is pretty boring and predictable in the first place, and you're in a price war
losing money on bestsellers ... duuh.

[tgtaylor]

http://i.ebayimg.com/17/!B-U4tJwCGk~$(KGrHqEOKi8Ezh6FpvgwBM8YPYl1+Q~~_3.JPG

[Drew Wiley]

Don't remind me of that, Tom. Both Moe's and Cody's went down. But Black Oak Books is still in town. Can't say I miss the 70's crowd on Telly Ave, however ... the street was crawling with heroin dealers, pimps, drug-crazed loonies, and UFO cults back then.

[tgtaylor]

Cody's went several years back but Moe's is still there - at least they were still there when I was last visited about two weeks back.

The Mediterraneran is also still there,; a change in ownership and business model but still there.

[Drew Wiley]

Cody's is still going on the other side of town, down by my office. They have the best
selection of new photo books of any store I have seen. Black Oak is the best for rare
out of print photo books. Blondie's Pizza is still going on Telly. My wife once had a UC professor who ate from Blondie's dumpster back when he was getting his phD but otherwise homeless. Apparently that was a common custom back then. I doubt the
pizza inside the restaurant was much better, but it was cheap and the students liked it.

[rdenney]

Yes books certainly are one of life's pleasures and I never needed batteries to read my books. This debate looks, feels, smells sorta like the ever present film vs digital experience -- trad against tech.

And once more, that is a straw man for a difference without distinction. I like the smell of ink, and I have become old friends with some of my books. Others are consuming space in my house for no good reason: I will never read them again but I can't bring myself to dispose of them. My heirs will have no trouble filling a dumpster with them.

But I travel nearly constantly (I've been in my office exactly one day since May 19) and I go through a lot of reading. It is not possible to bring enough books in my briefcase for a 10-day trip such as the one I'm currently on. But my Kindle can be filled with books that not only give me something to read, but give me some selection, too. The battery lasts for weeks, and frankly the readability is better than the average paperback or book-club edition, particularly since I can enlarge the text as needed.

There are no statistics that I can find on book sales trends over the decades. In that industry, like many others, "long term" seems to me since last quarter. But I wonder if books sales overall are plummeting the way those who claim society is going to Hell seem to think.

Thinking in the very long term, books were rarely owned more than a century or two ago. They were expensive and only the wealthy had them. It's the same as with education, another Hell-in-a-hand-basket prognostication. Education is not as extensive as it once was, except for the very well educated, but in the deep past, there were the very well-educated and the completely uneducated. Having education beyond basic literacy and arithmetic was only for the rich before about 75 years ago. Now, the masses in the middle are reasonably well educated, where a century ago they were at best minimally educated. Likewise, books did not reach the masses until the 20th Century, and even then most people read dime novels and other non-literature, often presented serially in magazines. Book stores were small, independent, and catered to an educated and financially secure clientele. As books invaded the masses, publishing exploded, and in the long run that led to a high-volume discount business model. Now, as with music, digital delivery is becoming a preferred delivery and sales mechanism because the costs are so much lower, and that attacks that high-volume retail store model. But it lacks the ability to browse, and that might allow a resurgence of small bookstores. We can hope.

But it seems clear to me that book sales, relative to population, increased dramatically over the last century or so, and I'm not sure the failure of a particular sales model (especially considering the rise of alternative models, not all of which are digital) means that we are seeing a collapse of reading in the context of that long-term trend.

It's all speculation, of course, but perhaps a bit less reactionary than the usual complaints about lazy and stupid young'uns, which have been with us since the dawn of time.

Rick "marveling at how people think the last five years describes a trend for something that has been bought and sold for half a millennium" Denney

[Robert Brummitt]

We still have Powell's books here in Portland, thank goodness. I'm sorry for the employees of Borders but as was stated before their business practice was at fault. They didn't adapt to the market.
I still like to browse and buy photography books but I see myself using my tablet for magazines and news. If they are a good price. I bought two e-publish Lenswork for my trip south. Enjoyed them greatly. They copies cost me $4.95 each. What is a hard copy these days?

[David Karp]

I won't miss Borders. I used to buy books there. The customer service was terrible. After one particularly ridiculous interaction, we just stopped going there. B&N and Amazon, or smaller local stores were all just so much better.

Interesting how Amazon is more like your old locally owned bookstore than it is like a chain. If you hung out at the independent store a lot, the people in the store got to know what you liked, and could make recommendations. That does not happen in a chain store. You "step in" to Amazon, and there are the recommendations waiting for you. You can browse through vastly more books than you can find in the store, and you can read passages from many of them. A more personal approach provided by a computer program. A far better experience than dealing with Borders.

[John Koehrer]

[QUOTE=rdenney;752694]I'm not sorry to see Border's go. They, along with Barnes and Noble, had become the WalMart of book sales, driving the small, independent stores out of business in most places. Trouble is, books are not like WalMart sundries and those small stores reflected enough of their owners' interests to make browsing fruitful. Browsing in the book supermarkets was more waste of time than anything--they never had the best books on any topic or the best examples from any author. They had too many of what was left after the good stuff sold.


Exactly why the small shops of all kinds went under. Wally World and it's ilk.
With Border's gone there's some hope there's a resurrection of local booksellers.

[Richard Mahoney]

Dear Ed,


Wonder if anyone will publish big photobooks when there are no more stores to ship them to? Will they sell over the Internet when you cannot see and feel them? Or will we just be looking at images on Ipads and other screens?

Well, a month or so ago I was wondering the same, at least about the first of a series of `small' collections I'm publishing:


Camera Antipodea - Catalogue No. 1 : Photographs by Richard Mahoney (Oxford: Indica et Buddhica, 2010). ISBN 9780473177911 (hbk).

I've always liked the feel and smell of well made, especially old books. And I just like having them around -- the best wallpaper by far. Still, I've usually bought books after seeing them first, and it bothered me that most everyone might be the same. Not so, it seems. I've been pleasantly surprised at the number of orders my booksellers have been receiving over the past month. The critical thing, it seems to me, is having access to a decent, efficient, distribution network that makes it convenient and simple for people to get hold of one's work. A good number of people, it seems, actually enjoy ordering books online -- they think the whole process can be fun ;) And if I'm going to be honest, I feel the same when I order something from KEH -- and the differential between a decent book of photographs and a decent lens can be significant.


Kind regards,

Richard

[goamules]

This just continues the trend. The trend, as I see it, is for every retail industry to collapse or assimilate into one remaining, big box entity. There will be one, and only one:

Software company
Home improvement store
Aircraft manufacturer
Automobile manufacturer
Cheap everything else store (walmart)
Electronics store

Why should it be any different with bookstores? (with only a touch of exaggeration)