Like Ann Arbor native Jay Nordlinger, I remember when there was just one Borders, and what an amazing place it was in the seventies. I wasn’t shocked that it became a chain, though I wondered why such a chain would have just happened to have started in the town where I went to school. But the owners didn’t have the foresight of Jeff Bezos, and anticipate the future. But even if they had, it’s not clear that they could have saved the brick and mortar. Even the best buggy-whip manufacturers didn’t survive the advent of the automobile. Like, Jay, though, I wonder how we will be able to browse on the Internet, and how to capture the scents and the social experience of discovering a wonderful book for which you hadn’t been looking.
Michigan native (and resident once again) John Miller has more thoughts, as does Rich Lowry, with some relevant commentary on creative destruction and the moribund stasis of government bureaucracies.
[Update a while later]
Many commenters note, both here and at the links, that Borders committed suicide by losing touch with what made it attractive in the first place, so it wasn’t even one of the better buggy-whip makers. It’s also worth noting that some of the carriage makers survived into the auto age by adapting (e.g., Fisher Body in Flint and later other places as part of GM, and Studebaker).
Have you seen the post by Larry Correia floating around about Borders and their recent sales practices?
Based on his account I suspect there’s probably more to Borders’ decline than that they failed to invent the Kindle or the Nook.
Couple of things they screwed up on were growing too fast in the brick-and-mortar space (and negotiating long-term leases without considering the possible need to contract) and in allowing Amazon to run their on-line business. Even though they were not the best run company ever, if they hadn’t made those two mistakes, I think they’d still be around.
Like, Jay, though, I wonder how we will be able to browse on the Internet, and how to capture the scents and the social experience of discovering a wonderful book for which you hadn’t been looking.
Well, scents are going to go away, in this context. (Which can be good, because remember, bookstores are also full of filthy, stinking humans.)
But discovering a book you hadn’t been looking for? That’s what recommendations and blogs and a giant network of friends all talking about books is for.
Browsing? Amazon (eg.) makes it easier to browse than any real bookstore, for the most part. Trickier to read a chapter or whatnot (though the previews will often at least let you read a few pages) – but then I’ve never done even the parenthetical on books I was looking at buying and unfamiliar with.
So, I just don’t see a lot being lost here.
It is nice to hold a book in your hands before you buy it to feel its heft, the paper quality, and look for any imperfections in the printing process. It is also nice, to look at a wall of books for a cover that would stand out against the crowd and that doesn’t always translate well to the internet.
Shopping at a Borders is much more pleasing than going to the local book store frequented by the liternazis.
I just don’t see the love for the traditional bookstore–and I am as big a bibliophile as anyone will every see. Borders was great because it had more stock. Period. With Amazon, not only are there orders of magnitude more titles available but I can add interesting books to my shopping cart whenever I come across a title (something like 400 in there now). And I get suggestions on other books. And I get user reviews of books. And I get second day shipping of as many books as I want for a year for a modest price. And I get linked to an outrageously huge secondary market. And I get all of this for less than a traditional bookseller and I don’t pay sales tax.
I have a kindle so anytime I want a book I can get it instantly, which is a problem sometimes, when I forget how much I just spent on books.
I first met Louis and Tom in 1976. At the time, a few friends and I operated a wholesale book company named Big Rapids Distribution Company, and the Border brothers were gracious enough to do business with our tiny operation. I had the Ann Arbor route until 1980 when our company ceased doing business, so I was an eyewitness to the remarkable changes the Border brothers made to the retail book trade.
I remember well when the brothers first brought up their computerized inventory and ordering system. It was truly revolutionary for the time, and extremely expensive, yet it changed forever how bookstores maintained their inventory and did their ordering. The thing ran on what I believe was a Microdata 2300 (I could be wrong about this), and it was on such a machine that I first learned to write code (the profession I remain in to this day).
It is hard to believe the famed Borders operation is about to disappear (although Louis and Tom did very well when they sold to Kmart in 1992), but as for all things extant in this vale of tears, the sand has run out of the glass.
So long Borders, it was nice knowing you.
To echo Sigivald, if anything discovery of new books is actually far superior online compared to a physical bookstore. You don’t have much to go on in the bookstore, if you’re extremely lucky then you’ll find an attendant who happens to share some of your interests and taste. But on a site like amazon you get suggestions that are based on the reviewing and buying behavior of millions of people. And you also get a lot of written reviews. My experience has been that amazon is vastly better for discovering new books.
I recently purchased a book on bread making from amazon and spent a lot of time researching which book would be right for me. Ultimately it came down to reading written reviews (both good and bad) to give me a sense of the books I was choosing between. Ultimately I’m very confident I made the right choice, but when I was in a Barnes and Noble recently I happened to notice that they didn’t even carry the book I ultimately bought.
Exactly. I just finished one, and have begun another, Kindle book I learned about from reading blogs/Twitter/whatever. Two are by people I knew online long before I heard about their books.
Hmmm. I was thinking that I had three of these Kindle books I found this way, but I failed to mention it in my previous comment.
I always figured that browsing online should be the same as browsing in a well-run real-world bookstore. Divvy the book stock up by type/subject/department and shelve all the books in each of these subsets alphabetically by author. Your on-line interface would just be a digital simulacrum of all of those book spines facing out at you. Mouse over one and you get a pop-up of the book’s cover. Click on it and you get the latter-day Amazon alternative peek inside: TOC, index (if any), first few pages or Ch.1, etc. I was trying to develop something like this in the late 90’s as I saw deficiencies in the Amazon interface as it existed at the time. Broadband was necessary to support the graphical elements of the user interface at acceptable speed, though, and just wasn’t widespread enough – or cheap enough – to make it practical then. Now, it seems, it would be a fairly trivial thing to do. I’m still waiting for someone to do it.
Amazon may just well do something like that with their October iPad killer
As bookstores disappear, libraries may step to the front as the centers of “book discovery”. I could even see publishers subsidizing them, perhaps cutting deals so that e-book versions could be loaned out with the option to press a button to buy a copy.