Goodbye, Borders

[chrisconlon]

It’s always a little scary when a major retailer, one that’s been around long enough that it’s hard to remember a time they weren’t there, goes under.

Yet the liquidation of the Borders chain only makes obvious what’s been clear to a lot of people for some time: that the era of the super-mega-bookstore is nearing its end. In his farewell statement

Comments

[cinriter]

I think independents are poised to make a nice comeback, but it won't be as paperback sellers. The profits on paperbacks aren't high enough, and paperback readers are the likeliest to become e-book readers. I just read an article today about three stores in northern San Diego - the two that were failing/had failed were paperback stores, while a used bookseller carrying mainly hardbacks was doing "great

[chrisconlon]

Lisa, I definitely think used bookstores are in a different situation--and are likely to thrive for some time to come. After all, no matter how popular e-readers become, the billions of books that have already been printed aren't suddenly going to vanish off the face of the earth. As for new indie bookstores...I hope so, even if, as with Borders, I'd probably just end up looking at books in them and never buying anything!

[tztony]

A World Without Borders. Can't say I'm that broken up about it, either. I rarely shopped the Borders stores in my area; they never seemed to have that fine a selection or to be on par with the local Barnes and Noble. And reading yesterday about their use of some common but deceptive business practices in closing out their stores makes me lament the loss all the less

[chrisconlon]

Tony, thanks for that. FYI, Publishers Weekly predicts that e-books will outsell printed ones by 2015. I suspect it may happen even earlier. But sure, it's a long process: after all, the LP existed for only--what? 30, 40 years before the advent of the CD? VHS lasted 25 years, something like that, before DVDs. But printed books have been around for millennia. It's also true that in some ways e-books are still limited right now, in the early stages of their development. (I still buy poetry in printed form, not e-form.) And you're right, no gagedtry is needed to read a printed book--another advantage to the printed book for now, maybe, but in our ever-more-wired First World lives, that increasingly won't matter. Anyway, does anybody seriously think that in 100 or 200 years, when we're taking spaceships to live on colonies on Mars or whatever, people are going to be packing suitcases full of paperbacks to take along