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

It's their own fault.

[Lumpy]

Honestly they were overpriced on everything. I have not set foot in a borders or a Barnes and Noble for 3 years now because of their price gouging. No I'm not a trendy yuppie who wants a $4.00 coffee while I browse your store trying to look trendy. Honestly they went for "upscale" instead of a model that would have survived..

If they would have stuck as a "mom and pop" ish look and had a big old book or used book section they would still be thriving today. Instead they took the "snobby U of M rich guy in a turtleneck" direction instead.....

Re:It's their own fault.

[ScentCone]

Your complaint, your characterizaiton of them and their customers, your odd notion of what is and what isn't "gouging" and everything else about the tone of your comment suggests that you need to get out more and meet more people. Possibly even some that wear turtlenecks. And it wouldn't hurt for you to spend some time running a retail store, so that your sense of "overpriced on everything" can get connected back to the reality of what it costs to rent, insure, maintain, staff, and market a walk-up book store in the age of Kindles and iPads.

The mom-and-pop book stores you long for were dying out harder and faster than Borders did, and the ones that survive do so because they've found things beyond the collections of books you mention to sell (mostly, they're transitioning to hybrid coffee shops, galleries, meeting places, lecture venues, etc). Barnes and Noble survives because they squeeked by with the Nook just in time to not get completely eaten by Amazon.

Re:It's their own fault.

[RazzleFrog]

How were they overpriced? They sold at the same exact price any other brick and mortar book store sold new books at - the price stamped on the back by the publisher. You want used books - go to the Strand.

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.

Re:It's their own fault.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Honestly they were overpriced on everything.

Too true. I live outside the US, and can get books air-freighted in from Amazon in the US for significantly less (half the price, sometimes a quarter of the price) of the shelf price at the local Borders. That's a pretty severe sign of price-gouging.

Re:It's their own fault.

[Xest]

The UK Borders chain closed down about a year or two ago. It's a bit of a shame because we really have nothing else comparative nationwide, perhaps the closests is Waterstones but most their stores only sell the latest romance novel or Jordan autobiography and shite like that rather than a useful range of maths/science/computing books. Short of going to a handful of cities like Cambridge which still have good book stores, there's really nothing- pretty much the whole of the North of England seems devoid of good bookstores.

I agree it was their own fault, they were overpriced, I did tend to go in to have a look because it was great for that, but do I buy the OpenGL SuperBible for £40 there or do I buy it for £25 from Amazon? Bit of a no brainer really.

But I found it wasn't just their prices, they relied heavily on misleading promotions- a series of identical kids books was 3 for 2, so we figured we'd get 3 for my neices birthday and despite them all being on that shelf when we got to the checkout it turns out that only random books in the series were 3 for 2, and they didn't tell you this and merely hope you wouldn't check your receipt to see that you'd in fact been charged for 3, and then when we go back into the store to ask why we'd been charged we get some pissy clerk try and pretend it's our fault as if we're meant to be able to magically guess which books on that shelf are part of the promotion and which aren't.

So I do miss them, and I love the likes of Chapters when I go to Canada (particularly in Ottawa where you can't travel for 5 minutes without bumping into another chapters store!), but when they ran their business like that, there's really little one can say, they were truly their own worst enemy. I wouldn't expect Amazon prices as I recognise running a store is costly, but charging £40 vs. £25 is really just greed, and there's no way they were going to get my business doing that.

Re:It's their own fault.

[crawling_chaos]

the tone of your comment suggests that you need to get out more and meet more people.

This is Slashdot. That goes without saying.

Re:It's their own fault.

[CRCulver]

Selling at MSRP is hardly "overpriced"

It is. When you're a large, nationwide chain, you can negotiate with the publisher for lower prices and leave your unorganized competitors stuck with the MSRP. Amazon did with great success, but Borders didn't.

It is much easier to search through a topic or genre for a book that interests me when there is a huge shelf full of actual books then trying to do searches on the internet.

Some of the pirated books communities are making it as easy to browse through a subject as going through a bookshelf, and you can do it all from your home and for free. It's nice that you like the trip to the store and the physical artifact, but not everyone shares that love.

Re:It's their own fault.

[TheRaven64]

I always thought Borders was the shop for pseudo-intellectuals who were terrified of books. I couldn't think of any other explanation of why they had a much lower ratio of books to floor space than any other book store I've ever been in. I went in a few branches around the world, and never bought anything.

Here's a hint for anyone wanting to run a book store: it helps if you stock a wide range of books, on big shelves, not just a few tables with some artistically arranged on them.

Re:It's their own fault.

[hal2814]

The original assertion was: "If they would have stuck as a "mom and pop" ish look and had a big old book or used book section they would still be thriving today."
The response was: "The mom-and-pop book stores you long for were dying out harder and faster than Borders did, and the ones that survive do so because they've found things beyond the collections of books you mention to sell (mostly, they're transitioning to hybrid coffee shops, galleries, meeting places, lecture venues, etc)."

Yes, I did compare a used bookstore to a new bookstore but only to show that the original assertion was likely correct. You don't need to sell non-books to keep a new bookstore in business. Selling used books is a viable alternative.

Re:It's their own fault.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Selling used books is a viable alternative.

For now. I do like my local used book store, but it's a 20 minute drive each way for me, and their selection is necessarily limited, largely towards best-sellers and self-help books (high turnover types, I imagine). They sell for half of the list price, and split that 50/50 with the consigner.

By contrast, Amazon can offer me any used book, usually for much less, and have it mailed to me for $4. The reviews are better than browsing in almost every case.

If I needed to open a used book store today, I'd focus on children's books, where exploration and browsing are actually essential.

Re:It's their own fault.

[demonbug]

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.

Their stance on cd's/dvd's was/is really strange. They charge obscene prices for them, as you say, so the only times I ever bought these items from them were when they were on clearance (very rare) or when I got some especially good deal mailed to me - like the time they sent out a coupon for 60% off any boxed set (which I used to buy Flying Circus on DVD). I don't know anyone who regularly bought movies or music from them. And yet, a couple of years ago they went through and completely redid the interior of the store and actually significantly increased the space devoted to music and movies while reducing the selection of books. Instead of having the best selection in town for most genres of books, they went to having basically the same selection as the much smaller book stores around. Which, of course, means that the last five or six times I've been in there looking for a specific book they haven't had it - leading me to Amazon, and not even bothering to check in the future (note to brick-and-mortar stores: don't even bother offering to order something for me; if it isn't in your store, Amazon will get it to me faster and cheaper than you will).

It really seems like they sacrificed the thing they were good at, selling books, for something they really sucked at - selling digital media. They were astonishingly bad with blu-rays; for some reason they charged literally 3-4 times as much as other retailers, and kept them in locked cases so you couldn't even really browse them (I asked why they did this once, and was told that it was because lots of people were stealing them because they were so valuable; apparently the only people who thought Borders' prices were realistic were thieves). When you are offering something for $45 that I can get down the street for $25 or online for $15, you are just wasting valuable (expensive) retail space.

Re:It's their own fault.

[treeves]

Ah, but this is Slashdot. Nothing goes without being said.

Re:It's their own fault.

[Grishnakh]

Borders probably did have special pricing deals with the publishing companies, but they needed to net 40% or more profit per book to cover their operating expenses.

But somehow, their small, independent mom-n-pop competitors could sell books at the same MSRP even though they didn't have these special pricing deals or economies of scale?

Sorry, they were gouging, plain and simple.

Fahrenheit

[improfane]

Who needs to burn books and things that last when you have technology to do it for you?

I hate to say it but technology both gives you freedom and inherently takes other freedom away.

Books will slowly become the domain of the academic and public service, so they will gradually fade from prominence. With ebooks, you are at the whim of the ebook publisher, DRM, the ebook reader manufacturer and of course electricity.

Don't let that stop you buying ebooks though, I try own a physical version for important books. I see an ebook as a modern day convenience most certainly not an equivalent replacement.

Re:Fahrenheit

[osu-neko]

Yes. Buy a car, and you're at the mercy of oil companies, government licensing agencies and public infrastructure. But you'll get further faster than you did on foot nonetheless...

Re:Fahrenheit

[arcite]

Books will become antiques and collectors items. If one looks at the 21 century information society, books have no place in it. Once all current books are scanned and fully digitized, any human on the planet with an internet connection will be able to access them. This is a powerful tool that is not fully realized. e-book technology is till in its infancy. You're also fooling yourself if you assume that a paper book is automatically superior to a digital version. A paper book only has one copy, is probably printed on cheap paper, supportable to moisture, mold, insect, natural disaster, fire... you name it. Books are perishable goods and none too portable. Digital information is forever and can be backed up infinitely.

Re:Fahrenheit

[improfane]

You are absolutely correct.

A company would never remove books on your device, would they?

Books will never be re-written to remove dangerous paragraphs will they?

Your Ebook reader will never be designed for obsolescence will it they?

The online services of your ebook will never go down?

If your ebook provider goes bust, they will obviously have thought of that and leave behind the books behind for you to download, right? If they don't go bust they will never phase out the service, ever?

Your Kindle would never be stolen would it?*

Your books will always work on other eReaders?

* This point depends on my assumption that people are more likely to steal an Ebook than a regular book.(Do people honestly steal books?)
 

Re:Fahrenheit

[improfane]

Forgot to preview that one. That should say people are more likely to steal an ebook rindle (like a Kindle) than they are your soppy romantic novel.

Re:Fahrenheit

[smooth wombat]

If one looks at the 21 century information society, books have no place in it.

Congratulations on tossing aside thousands of years of human history. The written word is necessary in a society where not everyone has the ability to purchase a digital device which may or make not work depending on the whim of the manufacturer and the ability of electricity.

any human on the planet with an internet connection will be able to access them.

Congratulations again. You've just excluded at least one third of the world's population, most likely closer to half, who don't have a net connection and will probably not have one in the foreseeable future for various reasons. Cost and infrastructure being the two biggest culprits.

A physical book is what reminds us that not everything has to be available at an instant, that we can take our time to sit down and enjoy ourselves without the worry of glare off a screen, our batteries running out or spilling our Dew on the device and shorting it.

While books may be perishable, they are far more durable than any electronic device. Excluding fire and lack of light, a book is available at any time and any place. Not so with an e-book. In addition to spilling a liquid on it, one can crack the device if misplaced in a bag, scratch or otherwise damage the screen, lose power, bake it in the sun, and a whole host of other issues, including mold.

People have always looked back when something we took for granted was replaced by something which was supposed to be "new and better". To quote Barney Stinson, "New is always better." To which Ted asked, "So those new Star Wars movies, are they better than the old ones?"

Ted then asks Wendy what their newest Scotch is, to which the answer is, Jimbo Jim's Grape Scotch. Oh, and don't let it touch your skin.

New is not always better. If you feel the need to rush through your day, go for it. But don't tell others they won't be able to sit down and take their time to read a physical book because you think they are a waste. There's a reason the few copies of the Guttenberg Bible, the works of Shakespeare and Darwin's works are so valuable. They are the physical manifestation of the author writ for all humanity. If a book is sufficient for Jean Luc Picard, it is sufficient for everyone.

The same cannot be said for a bunch of electrons.

Re:Fahrenheit

[mlts]

I will be a devil's advocate here, even though I use e-books all the time (mainly because it is a lot easier to carry a Kindle with an IBM Redbook and the O'Reilly UNIX admin books on it than to have the physical volumes.)

We are giving a lot of power to the people who sell the eBook readers. It might be that in the future that the next Catcher in the Rye may not be subject to book burnings and bannings -- it may just silently vanish due to a kill command issued to our readers.

eBooks are still in the infancy, but so are the DRM setups. It is only a matter of time before the threat of losing access to purchased material by an account banning cows the masses into accepting any DRM scheme copied to a device.

Re:Fahrenheit

[John Bresnahan]

Digital information is forever and can be backed up infinitely.

The information is "forever" only so long as the media lasts, and only so long as you can still read the media.

I have various backup media, which were the primary form of media since I've been a programmer, which would require custom-built hardware to be readable today. Not only is the hardware no longer commonly available, the hardware wouldn't be able to interface with any modern computer.

I have books, however, which were printed a century or more ago which I can read just fine.

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.

Re:Fahrenheit

[Frosty Piss]

Books will become antiques and collectors items. If one looks at the 21 century information society, books have no place in it. Once all current books are scanned and fully digitized, any human on the planet with an internet connection will be able to access them.

How about those without Internet connections? Either those that just don't want them, or those in places that don't have them?

Not everyone (not even the majority) are connected 24/7 like many Big City Dwellers.

Some people just don't feel the need to be tethered.

And - believe it or not - *MANY* people *like* books.

Re:Fahrenheit

[Renevith]

You're really reaching here, like someone who claims the warm hum and crackle of LPs makes them better. You can certainly claim that the objectively-worse aspects of books make them subjectively better for you, but you shouldn't expect anyone else to be convinced!

A physical book is what reminds us that not everything has to be available at an instant, that we can take our time to sit down and enjoy ourselves without the worry of glare off a screen, our batteries running out or spilling our Dew on the device and shorting it.

While books may be perishable, they are far more durable than any electronic device.

Whether a book is electronic has nothing to do with taking our time to enjoy it. You can sit down, take your time and read all the classic works of literature you want, at whatever pace you want, on an eReader. Modern eReaders do not have screen glare and have batteries that last for months. If you spill your Dew on a physical book you might have to throw away the actual book, whereas if you spill your dew on an eReader, the book itself is in perfect condition and always will be, safe on your hard drive and Amazon's backup servers. Just replace the device (not so expensive nowadays) and your entire library is restored for free.

Congratulations again. You've just excluded at least one third of the world's population, most likely closer to half, who don't have a net connection and will probably not have one in the foreseeable future for various reasons. Cost and infrastructure being the two biggest culprits.

If their conditions are that bad, do you think they're spending their money on libraries and textbooks? They're not going to have access to many books, electronic or not.

Most countries at least have cellular phone networks even if their other infrastructure is lacking, or they have one satellite internet access point. A few eReaders with cellular internet (or occasional access to satellite net) and months-long battery lives could be more valuable than an entire library, and wouldn't cost nearly as much to transport.

Re:Slashdot no longer...

[improfane]

It's more geekier than Reddit or Digg. You don't get long interesting comments on Reddit or Digg. It's a bunch of kids spouting memes.

Re:Thought ths had already happened.

[SJHillman]

The difference between the Kobo and the Nook/Kindle is that Borders partnered with Kobo whereas B&N/Amazon developed their own ereaders. From what I can tell, the Kobo is still going to be alive even if Borders turns to dust. Here's a nifty little article: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/borders-may-be-dead-but-e-reader-kobo-is-still-alive-and-kicking/

Re:won't be missed

[osu-neko]

We've got a Borders here in town... And I won't miss them when they close their doors.

It's been a long time since I was able to go there and buy a book that wasn't on some best-seller list. And they've got more movies, music, calendars, and bookmarks than they have actual books at our store. There's a reason they're going out of business.

They would have gone out of business sooner if they only had books. They added all those other things in an attempt to get people to come in and buy something at least...

Sales Tax

[rhadc]

The lesson I take from this is that the local retail is doomed unless we figure out how to address the online tax advantage.

Borders is a high profile example of a brick and morter shop that can't compete in an environment where its primary competition has an unnatural advantage. Amazon doesn't pay sales tax. Sure, it had some missteps along the way, like having Amazon run its web sites. But if Borders can't compete, do you think Mom and Pop retailers will? This impacts not or future local retailing environment, but local employment, too. Sure, online stores can be more efficient, but even a local preference for local retail won't compensate for a 5-10% price penalty.

rhadc

data peddler never was a good biz model

[bzipitidoo]

Technology caught up with their distribution system.

But I don't think much of the long term prospects of the likes of Apple's music business and Amazon either, at least not in its current form. Sure, they're relatively hot and new now. But fundamentally, they're still all about charging customers on a per copy basis. We won't settle for less than the best forever. And I don't think the Netflix model is it either.

I think the future is the digital public library.

They did it to themselves

[michaelmalak]

They sold too many web development books in the 90's to Amazon employees.

Re:Slashdot no longer...

[Dhalka226]

Cool story bro.

(I couldn't resist.)

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

Re:Borders Played a Pivotal Role in My Career

[bill_mcgonigle]

yeah, they died because people went and dog-eared their books without buying them.

I don't approve of his practice, but actually the big booksellers have all their inventory on consignment, so they probably don't care. That's why they were able to crush the local booksellers so easily, who had to purchase their inventory.

What did you say?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Speak up kid! Come a bit closer so I can hear you... closer... closer... *whacks arcite over the head with the fully annotated works of Tolkien in hard cover* try that with your kindle. See, the blood and pieces of brain just scrape off while your kindle would have broken as the cheap plastic toy it is.

Whacking whipper snappers, just one of the many reasons books are better.

I got a bible from my great-grandfather that went around the world and survived two world wars on the front lines. Your drm'ed bible is not worthy.

Re:What did you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you jest about digital information.

Books cannot be locked out based on date
Books do not require an internal power source
Books can survive missing a page or two, devices are less resiliant (scratch the screen, for example)
Books allow for easy notation
Books can be passed on without concerns of format compatibility.
Books cannot be remotely edited, and the various editions actually add to the assorted nature of books. (ooh, a first edition, sweet! but the 3rd edition was where they got rid of the translation errors...)
Books cannot be remotely disabled. (I remember a slogan: read a banned book today! These days, if it was banned it would be gone, end of story)

Re:won't be missed

[Ephemeriis]

They would have gone out of business sooner if they only had books. They added all those other things in an attempt to get people to come in and buy something at least...

I'll certainly agree that reading, in general, is less popular these days. And it must be hard to run a business that sells books these days. Especially with a monster like Amazon out there. But I don't think the solution is to become some kind of half-assed media retailer.

Start selling video games, or movies, or music... And now you're competing with folks who've based their entire business on that (EB, FYE), and the commercial giants like Wal-Mart who can genuinely afford to do a little of everything. You aren't shoring up your strengths with diversity - you're venturing into very dangerous waters populated with some very hungry fish.

Our local Barnes & Noble is doing just fine. Yes, they carry some bookmarks and calendars... And they've got a Starbucks in the lobby... But the vast majority of their store is devoted to books. Shelves upon shelves of books. They've got a huge section of very cheap used books... They've got all the current best-sellers... They've got a wide assortment of pretty much everything - fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, all of it... They've got knowledgeable employees who can actually tell me something about the books on the shelves, and help me find what I'm looking for... They've got less popular, more obscure titles that I can't find elsewhere (like at Borders)... They've got comfortable seating right in the midst of all the shelves so that I can actually sit down and read through a chapter or two and see if I want to buy the book... And they are genuinely embracing digital distribution.

In short - where Borders dealt with a changing book market by watering-down its offerings to the point where I had no reason to visit their store; B&N has responded to that same changing market by improving its offerings and becoming my first (and usually only) stop when looking for a book.

Good Riddance to Bad Business

[SmarterThanMe]

Doesn't surprise me. I worked for a chain bookstore (not Borders) when I was at uni, and they put me in the Motivation and Health section. By the way, let me introduce myself, I'm a teacher who specialises in working with gifted kids, and one of the things that I'm really good at is picking good, relatively advanced books for young kids who are beyond the books that their librarians and teachers use for other children. I read a lot of kids and YA fiction, and textbooks and educational texts, of course, but also scifi, fantasy and historical fiction, as well as non-fiction books in a number of areas. Notice something missing? I don't fucking read Motivation or Health! I can't even take those fucking books seriously, let alone sell them!

This wouldn't have been a problem, if it weren't for the rigidity of the PHB's that ran the place. My role was to stand by a shelf, and only help people who needed help with that section. One of my colleagues' spot was to stand by the self-service information computer behind a shelf, and almost literally jump out at people if they were having trouble with the search functionality (which only googled the bookstore's public website). As much as possible, I wasn't to move, and I had to do things as quickly as possible. One day, I spent 20 minutes upselling ~$150 worth of photo books and Australian kids' books to a tourist and I got a formal warning for walking away from my section and leaving it in the hands of two of my colleagues.

Let's talk about my colleagues, though. There was a guy hired at the same time as me who I was speaking to one day... Me: "So, what books do you read?"; Him: "Oh, I don't."; Me: "You don't... Read books?"; Him: "Yeah, they're boring." Awesome. He was Employee of the Month at some point after I left. I haven't been back there in a while, but I think he's probably still working there.

Their buying policy was brilliant, also. They bought hundreds of copies of things that they thought fit with the Australian psyche, i.e., obsessed with sport. So we were always left with hundreds of copies of the latest ghost written biography of some cricketer that we could literally not give away in the end. These books were always such an albatross around our necks that our PHB's were insisting that we keep them on the shelves, and sending newer, more popular books to storage or to the warehouse. If you wanted one of those newer more interesting books? You have to wait for it to be retrieved (a couple of days, usually), but please take a heavily discounted the 3rd volume of Warwick Smythe's test cricket antics that he paid someone from South Africa to write.

I shouldn't complain too much though. The 50% employee discount was awesome. Most of the long term employees were great people. Some of the supervisors were genuinely cool people. I laugh as I remember back to thinking back over having to help people "find a book, it has like a blue cover and words, I think", or "choose a motivation book for me, I don't know which one to choose."

These book chains are dying because they're trying to do business as if nothing has changed. They're hiring the cheapest, dumbest possible labour when people are only willing to go to a bookstore and pay a bit more than they would at Amazon because they want to talk to someone knowledgeable and well-read about books.

Re:Sad

[SailorMeeko]

I don't shop online generally, and refuse to use amazon on principle, so it all suck a bit. If I have to buy books online I tend to use AbeBooks, a collective of independant bookshops.

You do realize that AbeBooks is owned by Amazon.com, don't you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Acquisitions

You've got that completely backwards

[dbIII]

Actually the Australian government's restrictions on parallel imports for books

I looks like another one that missed that a lobby group for bookshop chains including Angus and Robertson set that policy decades ago and have been lobbying to continue it ever since, right up until at least a few months ago. It was nothing but a barrier of entry to small bookshops that were left with little choice but to buy from the big distributors. It was like that in the 1980s (when I worked in a small technical bookshop) and it's been kept in place ever since purely for the benefit of the chains.

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.

Re:There's a kernel of truth in the GP post

[Fnord666]

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.

Interesting fact:
Seattle's Best Coffee, which was the coffee featured in and the focus of the coffee shops in Borders, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Starbucks.

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.

Why libraries are dying too

[elrous0]

and the library only carried books on Fortran and Basic and COBOL

You point to a larger issue with public libraries here. With Amazon they've become almost worthless. Their collections are usually laughably out-of-date and small. Back in the day this wasn't so much a problem for them, because the only alternative was the local bookstore. But now Amazon has a selection that puts even university libraries to shame, and you can buy CHEAP from them (used copies of books often cost just a few dollars, even with shipping). Now there is really no need to settle for a crappy library book that's way out-of-date when I can *buy* the best book on the subject for next to nothing on Amazon (and no due dates to worry about).

Re:Shuttering

[Rob the Bold]

The 40-year-old book seller could start shuttering its 399 remaining stores as early as Friday

Seriously, what's with the recent rise in usage of the word 'shuttering'. I mean, I'm gay and all.. but I'm not THAT gay to use the word shuttering.

In a bad economy, it's only natural that the supply of synonyms for "closing" would be getting low.

Re: Cafe at Borders

[TaoPhoenix]

I was amazed and annoyed that they didn't even have real sodas! No Coke or Pepsi or Mountain Dew or Sprite or 7 up.

Instead you had to buy strange expensive caffeine free root beer or fruit sodas etc.