While there are some fundamental structural reasons for book stores to be failing, I’m sure that being politically stupid didn’t help Borders. It’s not a great business model to go out of your way to alienate many of your customers. It’s actually the same problem that much of the media has.
I have to say, though, that the downfall of the chain does sadden me, for nostalgic reaons. I knew Borders when no one had ever heard of it, when it was just the best book store in Ann Arbor three decades ago, before it became a chain. I wonder if the original one (actually, the original one moved into Jacobsons department store after it went under) in Ann Arbor will survive?
Both B&N and Borders have become toy stores that happen to have some books. The old Waldenbooks were tiny – but they crammed books into ever single nook to get them all on the store.
Now we have monster stores – and two-thirds of the space is occupied with non-book material. Combine that with wide aisles and short shelves, and we’re working towards an impressively low books-per-cubic foot.
I quit those big book stores years ago. I ordered books from Borders and Barnes & Noble that would never quite arrive. Lost in shipping, lost MY part of the order or lost the order all together. I just found it ODD that it was mostly the Right leaning, Conservative ideas, hot list books or orders that got “lost”.
The first time I contributed it to business as usual in the 20th Century, the second time, and second company, I said the same, the third and fourth times while swapping back and forth left me just plain pissed off. How was it that Scifi books and gardening books and all the rest got to me, but the Beck, Coulter, Malkin or similar books got lost along the chain.
I haven’t bought a new book from any of the corporate brick and mortar guys in several years. Not to mention the savings from buying used books through Amazon.
Of course, my wife must have ordered some kind of right wing, conservative quilting book too before Christmas. It disappeared in shipping, or maybe they WERE just inefficient.
There are book stores beside Amazon.com?
I’ll bet their real problem was their failure to stock forty linear feet of romance novels.
It’s not a great business model to go out of your way to alienate many of your customers. It’s actually the same problem that much of the media has.
I’ve heard a similar sentiment about Fox News. It’s said that Fox News targets a niche market – half of America.
I love books and buy a lot of them but the only time I find myself in a bookstore anymore is when I’m killing time while waiting for my wife who is shopping elsewhere. I can’t remember the last time I bought a book at a conventional bookstore.
The thing with Fox News is that they serve a market that wasn’t being served, the majority of Americans are center-right whereas the vast majority of pre-Fox news outles were left-far left.
Likewise a left leaning book seller should not expect to attract many of the center-right American majority.
So if there was a group of physicians who shopped at this chain, are they now Doctors Without Borders? D’oh, that’s already taken…
Actually, I was in one this weekend, and they did have a pretty good collection of “romance” novels.
Somehow, I don’t think this is what “Secure the Borders” means.
I keep my future reading list in my Amazon cart. Every few months I go through it buy hardcover cooks off Amazon marketplace. I’m paying a tiny fraction of what I would pay bricks and mortar for paperback–and I get the satidfaction of holding hardback, I’ve got ready access to several years worth of titles that interested me, and I get it delivered to my doorstep.
I have several hundred books on my Kindle, best present my kids ever gave me besides themselves. I used to take paperbacks to the library and kept hardbacks. Now, I only get hardbacks as gifts.
When Borders decided not to carry magazines that had reposted the Danish cartoons (under pressure from the usual suspects), they lost my business forever. Given the number of books my wife and I buy (DINK bibliophiles buy a LOT of books), I think that this alone doomed them (grin)….
Borders hasn’t been my choice for book purchases for quite some time. Unless it is in the discount / clearance rack, it is cheaper and easier to get it online. For me it became a place to buy calendars (Amazon’s search engine sucks for calendars), or impulse buys. And my Kindle has mostly killed the impulse buys of physical books.
Cecil Trotter Says:
January 6th, 2011 at 9:21 am
“Likewise a left leaning book seller should not expect to attract many of the center-right American majority.”
I.e., the segment of the population which, you know, reads.
Hi All,
Just a reminder, with the Kindle Amazon controls your library, not you, and may erase any book at any time.
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3830861/Amazons-Irony-Orwellian-Recall-of-Kindle-Books.htm
Amazon’s Irony: Orwellian Recall of Kindle Books
July 20, 2009
By Michelle Megna: More stories by this author:
[[[Amazon recently removed two books that were already on customers’ Kindle devices after a rights issue surfaced.]]]
At least you are able to bury paper books in the garden when you fear the government’s censors (or Bradbury’s Firemen) will come calling on you 🙂
You know, with my experience of Amazon’s customer service, attention to the actual wishes of its customers, reliability, and general good behaviour, I’d be perfectly happy for them to control my Kindle library, if I had one.
What you may be missing, Tom, is that the difference between Amazon and the government is that we can kill Amazon dead simply by no longer buying its products. They will go way out of their way to make a customer happy, because they know one big scandal will destroy profits for a year, and two or three will put them out of business. Does government think that way? Let us not die of hysterical laughter.
Get me a government where the taxes are purely voluntary, like my money going to Amazon, and I’ll consider giving it the same kind of trust.
Unlike most of your readers (it seems) I am a regular shopper at Borders. Their email coupons of 30% to 50% off make their books the cheapest around (certainly cheaper than Amazon), and I really enjoy being able to go into a shop and browse over books. I signed up and paid $20 for Borders plus membership too, with an additional 10% off, and have made really good use of that as well. (I’ve almost made my money back with that extra discount, so I hope they don’t go out of business for at least a little while!) As for it being a glorified toy shop … oh yes, and bring it on. I’ve bought Duplo Lego and board games there at prices that I’ve never seen elsewhere, online or otherwise, again using those beautiful email coupons. I also commented on my blog that I recently saw a desk calendar openly mocking Obama, which was a new experience at Borders.
I know they had a really rotten 3rd quarter, but I’m not sure the 4th quarter will be nearly as bad. I’ve never seen lines at Borders like the pre-Christmas lines of 2010. People were buying a LOT of stuff. They also had a very good promotion on buying gift cards, so I expect they’ll see a surge in revenue from the sale of those, but of course that’ll depress revenue as people use them in 2011.
My only negative experience with Borders has been their online ordering, which is clumsy and has pretty poor customer relations. I pretty much gave up with their online ordering after I ordered a book, nothing happened for several months, and when I contacted them, they barely even offered an apology for the fact that it wasn’t available and nobody bothered to contact me about it.
Carl Pham,
So what do you think Amazon will do if the federal government shows up with a court order demanding Amazon to tell them what is on your Kindle? Or the Federal government requires them to delete certain books because they are now banned? Or a foreign country that you happened to move to? Do you honestly think Amazon will stand in their way to protect you?
Also don’t be too sure of your Kindle working if Amazon goes under. At the very least don’t expect it to be fixed when it breaks. 🙂
Er…Thomas, are you arguing Amazon’s central collection of data is dangerous because it might be misused by government? That is an…odd…argument in favor of government, and against Amazon.
But OK. Let us suppose government does do just that: issues a wildly overbroad (and unconstitutional) demand for Amazon’s data. Obviously complying with that demand will be spectacularly unpopular with Amazon’s customers, indeed it’s not a big stretch to say that doing so would be suicidal.
In that case, with essentially nothing to lose in a fight for their corporate life, I expect Amazon to use its big pockets and expensive lawyers to fight for my 4th Amendment rights like fierce dogs, and ultimately tear the Justice department hacks limb from limb, gleefully decorating their home page with the thin gray gobbets of government drone flesh remaining after the appropriate court rules. Far fetched? It’s already happened.
Also don’t be too sure of your Kindle working if Amazon goes under.
Really? So if Amazon goes bankrupt, no clever investor will dream of buying what is, apparently, one of their most profitable assets — their Kindle empire — and continuing to operate it for a fat profit? So you think Wall Street really is inhabited by morons?
Can I observe that my new Samsung phone comes with a little free Kindle app, that lets me read Kindle format books on it? That the real value of the Amazon tech — indeed of any successful consumer-driven tech — is that it paves the way for a broad selection of similar devices, made by many vendors, surrounding a similar protocol? You’ll note that IBM has long ago ceased to make PCs, but their protocols and hardware standards continue to be used and supported by nearly every manufacturer to this day.
“So what do you think Amazon will do if the federal government shows up with a court order demanding Amazon to tell them what is on your Kindle? Or the Federal government requires them to delete certain books because they are now banned?”
Probably the same thing Borders or Barnes and Noble will do if the Goverment asks for a record of your purchases. Actually given the complaints of left wing bias I’ve heard about these stores, I’d bet on Amazon reisisting the Government before I would bet on the chains showing any backbone.
Oh, you think you’re pretty smart, Carl. Well, how about this: Dinosaurs with Lasers Rifles.
Yeah, think your precious Kindle will stand up to that?
Oh wait, almost forgot to laugh at my own jokes. 🙂 Ah, there we go. No unjustified supercilious façade is complete without those emoticons. 🙂 🙂
Their email coupons of 30% to 50% off make their books the cheapest around (certainly cheaper than Amazon)
The fundamental problem with Borders is that they shafted their publishers. They would order books, fill up the shelves, and then right before the date that they are supposed to pay for them, ship all the ones that they still had back, and then reorder.
You can only do this so long before your publishers abandon you.
It is (almost) inevitable that people with power will seek to abuse it, er, that is, to further their own agendas (sell only anti-Bush books) at the expensive of the stated agenda (sell as many books as possible). In a free country, no business “too big to fail” can stay in business for long with an anti-economic goal unless that goal matches that of its consumers, and no politician, even machine politicians, can or long carry out anti-voter policies.
Amazon has indulged in questionable behaviors, which will not be documented here. These actions are harder to spot than Borders’.
“I’ll bet their real problem was their failure to stock forty linear feet of romance novels”
You mean teen paranormal romance?
Carl,
That case was involving a paper book, not an e-book. Also it was based on a poorly worded search warrant. Courts may just look at e-books differently, especially since Amazon demonstrated it has the ability to track and recall them. Think in terms of “wire-tap” laws already being applied to emails.
As for the Kindle being the forever standard, I seem to recall Betamax owners believing the same thing 🙂 The Kindle is nothing more then a data storage format for media, and as the music industry shows, data storage formats tend to undergo radical changes over time. By contrast I am still able to recover data (i.e. read) from the book I bought in 1970, printed in 1866, by Jules Verne 🙂
[[[So what do you think Amazon will do if the federal government shows up with a court order demanding Amazon to tell them what is on your Kindle? Or the Federal government requires them to delete certain books because they are now banned? Or a foreign country that you happened to move to? Do you honestly think Amazon will stand in their way to protect you?]]eleventy]
It’s like the storyline of a Roland Emmerich movie.
Does anyone else think Matula never got over 8-track going away? Like he’s happy those cassette punks got theirs when the CD came out.
“Oh nooooss now we have mp3’s, how will I ever listen to my old music again….”
Did I mention I have been listening to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers on my iPhone on the way to and from work? I bet you couldn’t do that with one hand on the wheel and the other on your paperback heading down the highway at 70mph without the government coming to arrest you. 🙂
That case was involving a paper book, not an e-book…..[assorted what-ifs]
Sure, Tom. But now you’ve wandered off into special pleading, which means you’ve essentially conceded the main point, or at least have no serious counter-argument. So I win.
As for the Kindle being the forever standard, I seem to recall Betamax owners believing the same thing…
Well, first, they didn’t. There were two competing initial formats, and no one knew which was going to win, but as soon as VHS starting acquiring multiple points of support, everyone pretty much knew where things were headed.
I didn’t assert that the Kindle format was going to evolve into the standard for all times. Who knows? If you invest in a Kindle right now, then you take the usual risk of an early adopter. Duh. All I pointed out is that your belief that a Kindle would necessarily become useless if Amazon.com, Inc. fails is false. The Kindle may fail in that case as well — if it isn’t fated to become a widespread standard supported by many vendors. But it may not. And anyone who thinks the Kindle is so marvelous that he’s willing to be an early adopter is pretty much assuming that it is fated to take over the world.
And, finally, beware the Black Swan fallacy. The fact that people were wrong about Betamax says exactly zero about whether similar predictions with respect to the Kindle are wrong. No matter how many white swans you observe, you cannot estimate the probability of the existence of a black swan. Absence of evidence is, as they say, not evidence of absence.
Re betamax predictions: I assumed that HD-DVD would win the battle with blu-ray for the same reason VHS won over betamax. Luckily, I still waited to see for sure.
Leland,
I listen to audio books on my iPhone too. But I am under no illusion that either will be working a decade from now, which means I will have to buy the same audio books again and again in whatever format is the standard of the day.
By contrast the paperback copies I bought in the 1970’s will still be there and still readable 🙂
Carl,
Just compare how courts treat law enforcements attempts to monitor regular mail versus monitoring email. Courts DO handle electronic media differently simply because its so easy to track and monitor it. So a local decision on paper books is likely to have little impact on a decision on ebooks. And go back to that original article I linked to where Amazon simply deleted the books by George Orwell from folks Kindles when they found they didn’t have the proper copyright. DO you think they would have sent out a letter demanding you return a paper book if it didn’t have the proper copyright? Think about it….
Carl,
Another story on Amazon controlling “Their Library” on your Kindle 🙂
http://www.examiner.com/speculative-fiction-in-philadelphia/amazon-vs-publishers-the-end-of-the-kindle
[[[Amazon likes to pull some fast ones overnight, and last night they pulled all books from Macmillan and its many divisions, including Tor – the sci-fi/fantasy imprint. ]]]
[[[This is a prime example of why I will not buy a Kindle, because they decide they can do something and don’t let pesky little things like laws stand in their way. I’m sure you all remember that debacle where they snuck into everyone’s Kindle in the middle of the night and stole back a book they didn’t actually have the rights to sell but had sold to people anyway. If they had done that with physical copies of a book, physically broke in and took them back, that would clearly be illegal, but what about electronically?]]]
[[[Another reason you don’t want a Kindle is because Kindle books can only be read on Kindle readers, so let’s say for example that Amazon never works things out with Macmillan. That means that your e-book reader is now completely useless for about one-fifth of published books. ]]]
Just things to think about when you go with ebooks on a Kindle…
Hmm… Thomas Matula is against Kindles. Makes me want one even more. And I’ve got a book collection as well as two manual typewriters and a growing collection of old film cameras (that I actually use).
“…40 cubic feet of romance novels…”
The last time I was in a chain bookstore most of their fiction section consisted of those things. The rest was given over to cutesy pens and other gewgaws, hawking the coffee shop, and magazines. Oh — and non-fiction, which was mostly those coffee table books (babies in flowers, that kind of thing), and cook books. Oh — and there was an entire aisle of books and other items dedicated to coin collecting for some reason.