Borders Books, Dead At 40

theodp writes "There will be no storybook ending for Borders. The 40-year-old book seller could start shuttering its 399 remaining stores as early as Friday (store closing map). The Ann Arbor, MI-based chain, which helped pioneer the big-box bookseller concept, is seeking court approval to sell off its assets after it failed to receive any bids that would keep it in business. Hang on to those Borders Midnight Magic Party memories, kids!"

Comments

Re:It's their own fault.

[Totenglocke]

Their books weren't overpriced but their cd's / dvd's / blu-ray's were obscene. When you see Border's charging $40 for a new movie and you can walk into Best Buy down the street and buy the same exact thing for $20, there's no reason to buy non-book items from Border's.

Borders Played a Pivotal Role in My Career

[Phoenix666]

After I got out of grad school in the early nineties I discovered that having an advanced degree from one of the top 5 universities in the country didn't count for squat. After 18 months' fruitless search I got a job at a hedge fund fiduciary. 8 awful months later the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital Management blew up and nearly took the US economy with it then & there. People invested in hedge funds freaked, pulled out all their money, and I was without a job again.

I got a temp job in Northern Trust Bank's Private Banking division working up investment plans for rich people. The Private Banking division used Excel, of course. It was slow, and repetitious.

So I spent evenings and weekends sitting in Borders taking notes from their books on Visual Basic and VBA in order to automate the process. I couldn't afford to buy the books, I was so poor, and the library only carried books on Fortran and Basic and COBOL. I taught myself how to program that way (yes, I know it was only Visual Basic), and wound up reducing the turnaround time of the Private Banking division from 2 wks to an hour and a half. The division manager promptly fired me and stole my work, but I had found a new window of opportunity. I did more VB work, then added MS Access, then transitioned to VBScript during the dotcom days.

I switched to LAMPP in 1998 and haven't looked back. But it was those days & nights in Borders that allowed me to chart a course for a relatively stable career, given the turbulence of IT and Internet over the past decade. I dunno if their business model has any future, but for me then it was the right place at the right time.

RIP Borders

There's a kernel of truth in the GP post

[hellfire]

Books at brick and mortar stores tend to be overpriced compared to those sold online. That's not because Borders is gouging them, but because the publishers demand so much. Retailers' margins are thin. So yes they are expensive but Borders didn't "do it to themselves." Borders and B&N have a quaint, warm, relaxed experience but the most hard core book buyers go online now for better prices.

B&N actually survives because they have a good website in competition with Amazon, and frankly their selection has always been better than borders. B&N also has Starbucks in their stores, which gives them a hipster mystique for those who just want to come in and sit and read and have some Starbucks coffee. Funny enough, Borders tried to get early in the game of book selling online and who did they contract with?... Amazon. Most people don't realize this fact seriously delayed Borders' web strategy rather than enhancing it. They didn't have the vision to see web commerce coming and Amazon did to them what they did to mom and pop book shops. And they spent no time getting any experience in marketing and selling on the web because they contracted with Amazon in the early days. I'm betting Amazon knew this and went ahead hoping to basically steal sales from Borders original paltry websites. So in a sense, Borders did to it to themselves, it's just it had everything to do with not getting online fast enough.

Amazon holds almost all the cards

[elrous0]

Speaking for me, where Amazon dominates is in selection and in *used* books (and used videogames, etc.). If I want a book on a particular subject, I can drive to my local Borders and hope they have a decent book on it (usually not the best on the subject) and pay full retail price on it. Or I can go to my library and look at a bunch of books that are usually years out of date and hope that I can find a decent one that isn't checked out. Or I can go online to Amazon, see every book ever published on the subject, read reviews to find the best one, and then buy it used for a small fraction of what it would have cost new. And the same applies to videogames, DVD's, etc.

The only real advantage that brick and mortars enjoy is that I can get a book immediately (but the Kindle is making even that point moot), and that I can browse. But, since my tastes are not exactly mainstream, browsing isn't really much of an advantage to me. I have no desire to browse isle after isle of Harry Potter knockoffs and vampire romances, thank you. And I'm not a big coffee drinker.

Re:Sad

[TheRaven64]

Why publishers put up with demands for supply at zero-profit (sometimes negative profit) terms from amazon I don't know

Not sure what you're talking about here. Publishers sell at the net price, which is typically 50% of the cover price. Book stores then sell at the retail price and pocket the difference. When Amazon is selling a book at 45% off the cover price, it means that the publisher is still getting 90% of the sale price. When a book store sells at the cover price, it means that the publisher is getting 50% of the sale price. Authors are typically paid a percentage of net, so we get the same amount irrespective of where you buy the book.

At least, that's how it works with my publisher.

Re:Fahrenheit

[steelfood]

Books last centuries. We're able to read Da Vinci's journal and Fermat's copy of Mathematica where he wrote down his famous last theorem. How long will an e-book last? Will notes and remarks remain for the life of the e-book?

Your assetion that digital is forever, which is the entire basis of your statement, is simply and completely false. Digital data has not and will not withstand the test of time. Most sites from the early 90's, just two decades ago no longer exist, even if you're only looking at contents and not layout or design. Even the Wayback Machine doesn't have every page of every site, not to mention that there are sites that existed before the Wayback Machine. Even if a site was archived, the chances of the Wayback Machine and archive.org no longer being present within the next 100 years is much greater than the chances of all copies of any book degrading to the point of illegibility in the same timespan. The only information stored digitally that has even a chance of being perpetually propogated for more than a few years are the things that remain popular throughout. Historically, the only thing that remotely qualifies are religious and philosophical texts. And even then, most of those texts are often passed down to modernity having gone through translation, modification, and pieces have been outright lost.

You need to snap out of the "technology is humanity's savior" and "newer is always better" attitude. Technology is an enabler. That's all it is. It doesn't replace what exists already, it makes certain trade-offs to enable other things and open up other doors.

Books can be read with no electrical infrastructure, no equipment except your eyes, and can survive any environment. Your e-book reader needs a power source and the maintenance thereof, and can only operate under normal conditions. The contents of a damaged book can be partially recovered, in particular, the parts that aren't damaged. The contents of a damanged e-reader may not be recoverable at all. And I'm not even talking about DRM, which makes it even worse. Books can be buried underground for ages during times of turmoil. Your e-book reader's battery will be unable to hold charge after a few decades. Books are relatively easy to print and copy, difficult to retroactively modify, and impossible to completely remove from the face of the planet, short of burning every last copy. Electronic books, especially on a DRM'ed medium, can not only be removed from your perpetually-connected reader without your consent, but the contents can be subtly or otherwise changed en mass. Books cost $7-$10 for a mass market paperback, $20-$30 for a hardcover. E-books cost the same, plus the cost of the reader and the electricity the reader uses.

Besides which, I'd like to see you try to recover your e-book reader after you've dropped it into your pool or the ocean or even the toilet (in fact, you might not care to recover your book while you'll probably be more motivated to recover your reader, which is a huge plus for books right there).

There's a reason why certain aspects of life have remained the same for centuries, and it's not necessarily because people are incapable of or resistant to change. Some things have already met the ideal or are so close to them that any further attempts at improvement will require more time and effort than the improvement is worth. Books are one of them.