Borders to go into Chapter 11 next week

So a week ago, I blogged about the future of Borders and how its prospects looked bleak. There was speculation that Borders might soon go into bankruptcy. Well, now it looks like Borders will likely begin bankruptcy proceedings as soon as early next week, with an eye to closing a third of its 674 Borders and Waldenbooks stores and laying off thousands of workers. One analyst quoted in that linked article speculates that “I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within 10 years,” says Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York consulting firm. “Book stores are going away.”

That sounds a little bleak to me, but then again, I’m a book guy, so maybe I’m just trying to see it more positively here. Heck, maybe this will even ease a little of the pressure on Barnes and Noble in the long-run, allowing it to ease the pressure a bit. Amazon will certainly profit from this. And who knows, maybe the fact that many communities will have fewer brick and mortar stores from whom to buy books will hasten the rise of ebooks.

It’s all just speculation at this point, but I think it’s safe to say that the American book retail industry is in for “interesting times,” in the Chinese curse sense.

Tolkien literary criticism and new media

One of the first fantasy authors I read as a child was J. R. R. Tolkien. I absolutely loved The Hobbit, and liked The Lord of the Rings a great deal, though I found parts of the later boring (yes, I know that’s heresy…), and Tolkien’s work was largely responsible for sending me down the path of fantasy literature. I’m not an obsessive Tolkien enthusiast or scholar — though I’ve known a number of them over the years — but I think it’s very cool that Tolkien’s work is still being discussed in a serious way by literary scholars. One young academic in particular, Corey Olsen at Washington College, has embraced new media to create a series of podcasts and an associated website to explore and dissect Tolkien’s work. While I’m not personally interested in listening to podcasts, I know a lot of folks are and I appreciate what he’s doing (I would love to pick up the book he’s proposed assembling after he completes his podcast series). I also like that he’s attempting to bridge the gap between general readers and literary scholars — that’s a commendable effort.

Here is a Washington Post article on Olsen and his Tolkien scholarship. (My apologies if this piece requires a free login. If you don’t have an account with the Post and don’t want one, let me know and I will get you a copy of the article.)

The future of Borders?

A long time ago, there used to be many more independent bookstores — new and used — than there are today. A host of factors are responsible for this turn of events, but one of the most important is that we (I’m speaking of the U.S. here) now have two major, national chains of new book retailers: Borders and Barnes & Noble. The expansion and consolidation of these two book industry giants have forced many smaller chains out of business. (Remember B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, for example? Those were the two big bookstore chains in Virginia Beach when I was growing up. B. Dalton was acquired by Barnes & Noble in 1987 and the last fifty stores were liquidated in 2010. Waldenbooks was bought by Borders, but most of the remaining stores have since been “rebranded.”) The “Wal-Mart Effect” of Borders and Barnes & Noble, plus the rise of Amazon.com and the Internet, have all served to exert tremendous pressure on independent bookstores, and many of them no longer exist, at least as brick and mortar stores.

So why do we care about the current state of the book retail industry? Well, there are lots of reasons for book-lovers to care, more than I’ll go into today, but one reason I’d like to mention is that both Borders and Barnes & Noble are in serious financial trouble. And by that I mean that it would not surprise industry watchers if either or both entered bankruptcy within the next 12-24 months.

Here’s one more piece of evidence for that: For the second month in a row, Borders has announced that it is delaying payments to vendors and landlords. Borders can’t pay its debts, at least not on time or in full. And keep in mind, this is for the months of December and January. If a retailer can’t pay its debts during the Christmas season, how’s it going to continue paying them during the worst retail months of the year? Something’s got to give, folks. Borders and Barnes & Noble have helped close down a lot of bookstores over the years, and now they are in serious trouble. The face of book retail on a national level is going to look very different five years from now.

The Challenges of Ebooks and the Future of Books

Pretty grandiose title, isn’t it?

Tim Spalding of LibraryThing fame has posted some interesting thoughts on the future of ebooks, the publishing industry, and ownership of books. There’s some interesting speculation here that I won’t rehash, but the short version is that I agree with a lot of what Tim says here. I do have profound worries about what the publishing and book retail industries over the course of, say, the next 5, 10, 15 years. I really am a book geek and am also worried about the future of book/reading culture, I have to admit. I’ve gone on record as saying I have almost no interest in ebooks and no plans to purchase an ebook reader. And no way am I ever going to purchase a book that I don’t retain full ownership over. Having said all that — and risking a reputation as a Luddite — I think that digital technologies are very exciting and offer some wonderful opportunities for books and reading culture, not the least of which are the amazing potentials of both print-on-demand technologies and the digitization of public domain literature (and of course the marriage of these two capabilities as well). As bibliophiles, we live in interesting times (in the Chinese curse sense).

In a tangentially-related piece, here’s an interesting NYT article on the struggles of independent booksellers as they seek new strategies to stay relevant — and open for business — in the twenty-first century.

Comments, as always, are welcome.

(Oh and I will be resuming my more frequent posting schedule, having successfully crossed a major hurdle in my academic/professional life today.)

A couple of book-related NYT articles

Here’s a great, lengthy article on the bookstore scene and book-related events in San Francisco in Sunday’s New York Times (I believe that a free login is required, so if you don’t already have one and don’t want to do that, contact me and I’ll get you a copy). I haven’t made it back out to San Francisco in a few years, but this piece definitely makes me want to do a bookstore tour of the West Coast.

And here’s an article on a project that is doing an analysis of the titles of all of the 1.7 million British books published in the nineteenth century. Everyone’s always fascinated by what those wacky Victorians were thinking. Frankly, I don’t know that this tells us much — we’d really need to do a content analysis of the works rather than just do keyword checks on the titles for deeper insights — but it’s interesting anyway.

Interesting piece on the changes that eBooks might bring

Personally, I’m not a big fan of eBooks.  I don’t own an eReader and have no interest in buying one.  While I am certainly a reader (as an academic I read material in my field pretty much every day and I certainly read books for pleasure every day), I am just as much a book collector.  For me, I value books as physical objects as much as a medium for information transmittal.  The format matters almost as much to me as the actual content of the book.

Having said that, I’m no Luddite and I do own plenty of eBooks in the form of PDFs of various role-playing games (RPGs).  What do I do with these?  Well, not much.  The ones  really like get printed out, three-hole punched, and placed in binders for later perusal.  The rest?  They sit there on my hard drive.

But I know that I’m a bit unusual in all of that, and I do think that eBooks are going to dramatically change the face of the publishing and bookselling industries.  I think we’re already beginning to see some of these changes.  There are certainly positives and negatives with eBooks, and perhaps I’ll discuss my thoughts on those issues in a later post.  But for now, I’d like to provide a link to an interesting discussion of the changes that one thoughtful analyst — Tim Spalding of LibraryThing — suggests we might see as eBooks continue to grow in market share.