Yeah, me too, and the local library is surprisingly good… but the loss of Border’s leaves my entire county with just one bookstore, a used bookstore of highly limited selection, odd and inconvenient hours, and a lone owner/employee who will retire one day leaving none at all.
I will have to do all my new book shopping on-line, whether I want to do it that way or not.
Well, just go the official farewell e-mail to Rewards members. Gift cards will be honored for as long as the GOOB sale lasts, the discount for Rewards-Plus members until August 5th, “Borders Bucks” until the end of this month (since no new ones will be issued).
Borders in Plaza Las Américas in San Juan was consistently their #1 or #2 sales location – repeatedly doing around 4x the average store sales. Will be missed, had become something of a gathering place.
I just got back from the GOOB sale at my local Borders. Ironically it the busiest I’ve ever seen it. The line to checkout stretched almost all the way back to the children’s section. They’ve run out of shopping bags to the cashier just let make take the store-use only bag with me. I remeber how excited I was when that store first opened. When I was a closeted gay teen I used to steal the occasional gay magazine (& not just porn, stuff like the Advocate or XY too) before I worked up the courage to actually buy one. :o That was the only shoplifting I’ve ever done (& I did always spend a bunch on books & stuff too). This is really fucking sad. :eek: Although I did have to laugh at one of the signs they had on the door today.
[QUOTE=Local Borders store]
No Public Restrooms, try Amazon instead.
[/QUOTE]
This is really bad - as Broomstick said, we have no real bookstores left anywhere near us. I don’t like the library - I like to keep and reread my books - and book browsing is one of the most interesting and rewarding pastimes for me.
I use Amazon if I know what I want, but there is no way to replicate the browsing experience online. This ruins my Christmas shopping, and severely limits my impulse book buying. Maybe that’s good for my pocketbook, but it’s bad for booksellers and for my reading experience.
I hope you guys love your ereaders and online buying. I just got screwed completely in the one area of my life that is my first and enduring love 
as I’ve remarked before, this is a shame. Fortunately, there is a Barnes and Noble not far from me, and a Charity Used Book Store, but the next nearest bookstore was a Borders, and now it’s starting its going-out-of-business sale.
Worse, this mans the Borders Bookstore at Downtown Crossing in Boston is closing. Downtown Crossing still hasn’t managed to fill the empty store left when B&N closed their store there a decade ago. The owners think they can fill the store. I hope they do, because it dominates a public park. With the demise of the other Borders on Boylston, this leaves (aside from college bookstores and a few used bookstores) only the Barnes and Noble at Prudential Center and Trident Bookstore Cafe on Nwewbury open. In Boston, fer cryin’ out loud. Even the bookstore in the Galleria across the river in Cambridge will be closing, because it’s a Borders. All the independent bookstores in East Cambridge are gone now. You have to go to The Harvard Bookstore and The Coop in Harvard Sqyuare to get books. This, in the “Athens of America”.
I noticed Downtown Crossing is all but a ghost town, compared to the 90s. Any word on when or if Filene’s Basement will return?
I checked out the sale today, and it sucks. Fiction is 10% off, most nonfiction is 20% off. IOW, most prices are still higher than Amazon. OK, romance is 30% off. The email showed a giant 40% off, with a tiny “up to.” What’s 40% off? Magazines.
I wasn’t going to stand in that endless line for 10% off. I don’t understand why anyone is.
The same thing happened when my local Borders liquidated a few months ago: endless lines to pay more than Amazon charges. You just have to wait a couple weeks; they’ll go to 30%, 40%, and eventually even 70% off. But annoyingly, every section is a different percentage off.
I quit going to my local Borders (there were two or three within reasonable driving distance) because it wasn’t a book store any more. They had a decent selection of the same bestsellers that are at WalMart, Target, and even WalGreen’s. The thing is, at WalMart and Target the books would be discounted. If I wanted something that WASN’T on the bestseller list, then the friendly folks (and the floor staff were, indeed, friendly and as helpful as they were able to be) were eager to order the books for me. However, I’d end up paying as much or more than I’d pay if I’d ordered from Amazon. The delivery was no faster, AND I was told that I could pick up the books at the store. If I wanted an online shopping experience, I can stay home and do it. The Borders Rewards program required my email address. I was deluged with “special offers” nearly every day. I like getting notice of sales. I don’t need a new commercial email every day.
I used to go to Borders regularly, but they very rarely had any books that I was interested in buying in stock. So I quit going. Borders had quit being a book store, and had become a place for me to order books online…so what was the point? If someone doesn’t have internet access and a means of paying electronically, I can see how Borders would be a reasonable choice. But I couldn’t really make impulse buys at Borders, unless I wanted to buy toys or gimmick items. And I think that’s what killed that store, not ebooks and ereaders, but just the fact that they weren’t stocking their shelves with a wide variety of books.
Borders is closing at the same time as a long-established used bookstore a couple of blocks from my house.
Luckily, I still have a Barnes and Noble and different used book shop within walking distance…but the options are shrinking.
I live in a very bookish neighborhood. If the book stores are shutting down here…
Agreed. I noticed the same thing, although I was able to pick up a nonfiction book I’d wanted for a while, and there was only one person ahead of me in line.
I don’t think Filene’s Basement will ever come back. It’s still not certain that they’ll even cover up that gaping hole they have where Filene’s used to be.
Blue ray and magazines were the only things 40% that I could find.
I was going to ask if you happened to live in Plattsburgh, NY. The Cornerstone Bookstore has announced it’s closing after forty years in business. And the Borders will now be closing also. Then I realized you can’t be in Plattsburgh if you have a Barnes and Noble and another used book shop. Because Cornerstone and Borders are essentially the only bookstores in Plattsburgh (and Clinton County).
I bought the KOBO (that’s Borders’ brand of e-reader) from my local Borders when it was closing. The clearance price was $63 USD which is very cheap compared to others. It will read PDFs, even if the scrolling and text size is crappy, which is why I really got it. It comes with 100 Project Gutenberg favorites, some of which are so crappy that some people feel the need to delete them, but I liked at least a few. So I think the purchase was worth while. And the only cheaper e-reader would be an etch a sketch. 
Back in high school, Borders was a common date spot for my girlfriend and I. We were both nerds, and poor, and it was a cheap date. We could hang out for hours, reading whatever interested us, and the shelves were high so there were spots to hide for a quick kiss.
This does make me wonder how long B&N has.
This was exactly my experience with both Borders and Barnes and Noble, and is the main reason the number of forays I make to bookstores is now significantly lower.
I’m not a browser, so if I go to a store and they don’t have what I want, I leave; I’m not going to look around for anything else. And their offers to order the books for me simply increases my frustration. I actually don’t understand how the huge Barnes and Noble near me stays in business; the information desk is now permanently staffed with at least 2 sales associates who look up books and place orders, and the line is always longer than at the cashier. Why not simply stock the half-empty shelves dotting all the aisles throughout the store?
My Kindle has given me even less of a reason to actually go to a bookstore. On the other hand, there are books that I want from time to time that are not (yet) in e-reader format and, for those, it would be great to be able to drive down to the B&N and pick them up. Increasingly, however, B&N doesn’t have the book I want in stock, so I end up ordering the printed version from Amazon anyway; I simply refuse to have a brick and mortar store order a book for me, and anyway, in my experience, Amazon is cheaper than B&N in many cases.
It is sad, though not surprising, that Borders is now gone. I predict B&N to be not too far behind them. I simply can’t imagine a business model that allows brick and mortar bookstores to turn a consistent profit in the age of Amazon and e-readers.
and a big gap by penn station. the wee stores in the station just don’t cut it sometimes.
Agree wholeheartedly. I will also add that the Borders stores near me (a short distance from their WHQ) were possibly the most mismanaged stores I’ve ever encountered.
They featured long lines of people holding armloads of books and magazines, wanting very much to give money to Borders, waiting for the lone open register to ring up purchases. Local Borders stores had a half dozen cash registers but only one or two open. On more than one occasion my arms would get tired so I’d re-shelve the pile of books I’d hoped to buy, write down the titles/authors and go home to order them on Amazon. At the same time, groups of Borders employees would be huddled at the information desk, ignoring the massive line snaking through the store. Where was a manager to open up more registers? How many people, like me, just gave up and bought their books elsewhere?
People are probably not reading the whole thread at this point, but way upstream I posted that Borders’ problems were due more to bad management practices than people buying books online. They had too many oversize stores with overexpensive leases in poor locations. They sliced their own throats by handing their online fulfillment to Amazon. They treated their middle managers and staff badly. (Actually, they fired most middle managers, which is why you got situations like JuliaSqueezer’s.) They’re a lot like Circuit City, which committed suicide by firing their most experienced sales staff to replace them with lower-paid bodies who couldn’t serve customers. They went out of business but Best Buy lives.
More or less the same for Barnes & Noble at this point. They’ve had major problems of their own, certainly, but they were able to secure the capital backing that Borders never got. They are making a success of the Nook as a competitor to the Kindle, and the Nook is all theirs, again unlike Borders which went with first the Sony e-reader and them the Kobo. They’re larger to begin with, and it’s always an advantage being first in market share. They control the market in college book stores. And they no longer will have Borders as a competitor. The next biggest chain is Books-a-Million, which has one-tenth the revenues.
Ironically, a healthy Borders might have sunk both of them. Alone, B&N now has many extra years of life ahead of it. The markets for print and e-books are heavily age correlated. The print generation has decades of buying power ahead of it. The transition will come, but it will be far slower than most of you young’uns think.
I don’t know. I’m not seeing long life for B&N, not in its current iteration anyway. Maybe Borders going down bought them a couple of extra years, but many? I doubt it.
I don’t see the B&N stores being managed any better than Borders. It’s a less than wonderful experience to attempt to communicate with pheromone-distracted 18 & 19 year old dweebs who’ve obviously never cracked a book in their lives they absolutely didn’t have to as they dismissively and absent-mindedly point me to the wrong aisle. I can’t remember the last time I went into a B&N and spoke with an employee who actually knew anything about any of the books in the store. And their in-stock selection, at least in the store nearest me, is not just a joke, but an embarrassment; it feels like they’ve already given up.