Borders Bankruptcy Will Have A Greater Impact Than Predicted

nydailynews.com:

Borders is bankrupt, and you shouldn't gloat about it, even if you hate chain bookstores. In fact, if you are a writer, an editor or a reader, you should be downright furious. I am, and I never shopped there. But even if you only buy books at the smallest, cutest bookstore in the West Village, you're going to feel the tremors of Borders' demise. We all are.

Read the whole story: nydailynews.com

Comments

[WillCodeForCookies]

08:52 PM on 03/24/2011

I for one am glad to see the brick-and-mortar bookstore chains topple. Yes, in the short run it will be painful to see all the job losses, but it will be for the best. Books are moving inexorably to the electronic format and why shouldn't they? Ultimately what's important is the content of a book and not what medium it gets served from. Lots of people like to go on and on about how they like the smell of a book and how it feels in their hands. May I politely suggest that they get over that particular fetish? In the end, what makes a book a book is the content therein. Storing information as bits and bytes rather than as printed dots on pieces of paper is far more storage and process efficient. For this reason, taking up oodles of retail space and hiring armies of employees to manage them is an inherent waste of resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. I for one welcome these closures as a long-overdue cleansing and renewal process for the industry.

[William Miles Floyd]

08:08 PM on 02/22/2011

I swear the company was in default before I started working there.

[Richcrafter]

10:45 PM on 02/21/2011

Yep! Bad management does not a corporation make!

[leannk]

02:08 PM on 02/21/2011

Borders has been my favorite store since I was a child. I am very sorry to hear that the Ann Arbor Washtenaw location is closing down (favorite location). Unfortunately Borders lost it's marketing focusing in the last 10 years. They forgot what made themselves popular..........

[raven119]

11:17 AM on 02/21/2011

We have five bookstores in Brattleboro, Vt. We are a reading community. And the stores that are here (3 with new books, 2 with used) are not chockablock with James Patterson pulp or the latest vampire romances. In fact, they don't seem to be pushing all those disposable mass market books or overpriced trendy hardcovers. Maybe that's why they seem to have so much to offer.

[Ergon]

08:53 PM on 02/20/2011

The reality is that the publishing industry business model is equally obsolete. If it didn't have this urge to give multi million dollar advances to hack politicians and celebrities we wouldn't have $30 hardcovers in the first place.
Where are the new writers? Here's a suggestion: A publishing house that could pay them fairly and publish them straight to e-book? That'd cut costs and maximise profits, and we'd have more published authors than by the Darwinian process which sees fewer published writers every year. 
And sadly, people are buying fewer books these days. If we don't want to lose this cultural resource, we'll need to get to a book store, tout de suite.

[Hegemoneyhoney]

04:23 AM on 02/20/2011

Borders started out, and not SO very long ago, as an independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan - a really terrific one, too. I'm very sorry that Borders has had such troubles, just as I'm sorry when good small independent bookstores go out of business. The demise of brick and mortar bookstores, if the trend continues, is a huge loss to booklovers and the whole browsing experience that leads to the delightful discovery of a new book. We are in some kind of transition and it doesn't look like a good one - but we will know more in retrospect. I hope Borders recovers and Barnes & Noble continues.

[concrete things]

11:32 AM on 02/20/2011

You can browse in a brick-and-mortar library. For now.

[uncle emil]

10:09 PM on 02/20/2011

For now: The operative term.

[Erewhon7]

12:24 PM on 02/20/2011

Any time a major book store struggles it is a negative thing.
The problem is that they followed a faulty business model, incompatible with modern realities of the market to this bitter (semi) end.

Border and B&N built their e-readers fast enough to follow Kindle's coattails.
Why couldn't they have been innovators in the e-feild?

Answer: no vision, no flexibility, no brains.
But they persist in their folly to try to sell $30 hardbacks and then re-sell the remainder for $5. What foolishness.
Remember Tower records?

[PamperedHousecat]

12:40 AM on 02/20/2011

When I retired back in 2007, my co-workers gave me a Borders' gift card of $150.00.
I got discount coupons via e-mail, and I was able to parlay the card to over two hundred dollars (not all at once) in merchandise.
I will really miss this store although the people who live around the Beverly Hills Borders on Chicago's south side are trying to organize something (?) to keep the store open.
Stay tuned.

[BlueZoo]

11:30 PM on 02/19/2011

I worry more about the thousands out of work and all of the empty building shells Borders will leave in its wake! There is a trickle down devastation that is hard to take as well. All of these towns will lose taxes paid on those properties. The states will lose taxes too. Unemployment rolls will increase, putting a further burden on the states and the feds (us!). All of the creditors who will not be paid will seek to recoup their losses by increasing their prices to the rest of us. Each time one of these national chains fails, the ramifications are enormous!

[planetjeffy]

10:20 PM on 02/19/2011

record stores are gone and I enjoy music now more than ever

[calimom123]

09:26 PM on 02/19/2011

I live in a small hippieish Northern California town. We have a great indie bookstore here, that is part of a chain of about 4 in neighboring towns. They have a used bookstore as well, and I try to patronize them for children's books and my own reading material. They have a well informed staff which I really appreciate.

Not gloating at all about the closure of any Borders. I have shopped in them, while they're not horrible, it's just not my cup of soy latte. But I do hope (probably naively) that this hole in the market will give the indies a boost.

[Keith Moslak]

09:33 PM on 02/19/2011

Second.

[medialv2]

09:14 PM on 02/19/2011

Another industry that priced customers out of the frequent buying mode.

[Jessica Erin]

06:02 PM on 02/19/2011

borders was always the most expensive place when i looked for books...even at their going-out-of-business sales, 40% barely is a good deal, because their markup is so high.

[Concerned Citizen in CA]

11:16 PM on 02/19/2011

Publishers set the price, not the bookstores. If you look at the prices marked on the backs of paperbacks or on the inside flap of hardcovers, those prices are printed by the publisher, and should be uniform between bookstores.

[DontselltheUS]

09:31 AM on 02/20/2011

As a former indie bookstore owner, I can tell you that the profit margin on books is one of the lowest in retail. Chain bookstores and stores like Costco, negotiate better margins, but still have to sell huge amounts to make money.

[greeneye31]

05:19 PM on 02/19/2011

Once again GREED

[BlueZoo]

11:21 PM on 02/19/2011

A succinct and spot-on analysis!

[rdly54]

04:57 AM on 02/20/2011

I assume that's meant as sarcasm, right?

[jt1980]

04:50 PM on 02/19/2011

I like books in both paper and electronic versions, but I wonder about the longevity of the electronic version. Storing it in electronic form means that the data have to be converted from generation to generation. If files are not converted, they are lost forever. For example, since I don't own a floppy drive now, all of the files that I saved on floppy disks a decade ago are non-accessible, not to say anything about the magnetic media's higher deterioration rate than paper. There are companies like Google that are archiving books in their vast disk archives. That's wonderful, but I wonder at times about the effect of catastrophes that wipe out the electrical grid. All the archives will be gone, lost forever, because the power surge may very well wipe out the disks storing the documents. Electrical grid can be reestablished, but if that is done after a generation, forget about any hope of restoring what's stored on those disks. There have been academic papers on the fragile nature of the electronic media as far as time is concerned.

Paper is cumbersome, but we know it can survive thousands of years under the right condition.

[WillCodeForCookies]

08:40 PM on 03/24/2011

Google's data-centers are located all over the globe, with data being mirrored in multiple locations. Unless disasters are worldwide, in which case losing the archives would be the least of our problems, it is highly unlikely that you will lose anything that can't be recovered. Data-centers utilize cheap hardware which fail in a few years, as you have pointed out, which is why a huge amount of redundancy gets built into how the centers are managed, so that data and computational processes do not fail. So there is very little reason to worry about the short lifetimes of hardware if you leave the management of data up to reputable "cloud" service providers.

As more and more data gets moved to the cloud, people should have less and less reason to worry about their storage devices going bust and having to convert to new data formats. If your data is in the cloud, all the service provider needs to do on their end is convert to whichever format you need before serving the data to you. It should all be transparent to the user.