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: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...

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.

They did it to themselves

[michaelmalak]

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

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.

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.