Borders is shutting down

As we all suspected, Borders will be liquidating. All the 399 remaining stores will be shutting down by the end of September, and the liquidations likely begin at the end of this week. Kind of sad. That leaves us with B&N, Books-a-Million, a dwindling supply of small regional chains and mom & pop stores, and the Internet. It won’t be much harder to actually acquire books (Amazon is still your friend, after all), but it does mean that an important piece of bookish “culture” and community will be gone. Alas.

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2 comments on “Borders is shutting down”

This is indeed depressing news, but not unexpected. I honestly don’t know how to feel about it except sadness tinged with a rudely capitalist shrug. There didn’t seem to be anything Borders offered that another venue offered more, better, or with a twist. I hate to see any bookstore close, but progress marches onward. More people buy online, eBook sales are soaring, and even some Mom & Pop stores are finding their small size gives them an evolutionary agility that the bigger brick & mortar chains lack.

Just as I think paper books will never go away, so too do I think bookstores will remain, but their business models are going to have to change dramatically over the next decade in order to survive. Borders wasn’t able to make that change. C’est la vie.

You’ve captured my thoughts pretty much exactly. It’s sad, but seemingly inevitable for a while now. You’re right, they simply couldn’t adapt fast enough, and so they couldn’t compete. That’s just how it works. My own Borders was closed earlier this year, and the only things I bought there before the going-out-of-business sales were remainders or books I bought with 30-50% off coupons, which came out once or twice a month. I’m curious how B&N will fare over the course of the next year or two. In the near-term, this may ease some more of the pressure on them. If they also collapse, then that will surely hasten the demise of the mid-list physical book, I suspect. They seem to be increasingly focusing their efforts on ebooks anyway.

Joe Konrath had an interesting post about what he expects to happen in the book industry over the next few years: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/07/one-more-nail-in-coffin.html

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