And for me, driving to the nearest Borders costs about as much as having a book shipped from Amazon.
I used to make a list of books I wanted for summer reading, and go to my local store to place an order, since 95% of my list was not in stock (it’s a small store). The store didn’t want to serve me, wanted 100% payment up front, couldn’t guarantee delivery sooner than 6 weeks, and I had to go to the store to pick the books up when they arrived.
You bet your sweet ass I now buy from Amazon – aren’t the reasons obvious – discounted, shipped direct to my home in hours; I can often browse online (“look inside”) and the selection is almost any book in print, now or ever, new or used, and I can pick the price I want to pay from many choices.
The local bookstore goes belly up, it’s their own fault. Good riddance.
OK, I understand. And in addition to Amazon, Borders is competing with the discounters like Target, Walmart and Costco, all of which sell the bestsellers at heavy discounts. Amazon, of course, is killing them on sales of older books.
Yeah! They should all go under so I have no more bookstores to go to! That’ll show them!
The first mall bookstore I experienced was a WaldenBooks back about 1970. Before that, there was only one indy bookstore anywhere around – even the local college bookstore was negligible. I bought most of my books at local department stores, newsstands, or even hardware stores. Waldenbooks may have been “Big Box”, but it wasn’t driving anyone local out of business – it was bringing business to the area. I was entranced.
Mall bookstores proliferated through the next decades. My local small mall at one point had two bookstores, and the really big mall had four (!)
In the big cities I frequented, there were still plenty of indy booksytores and used book shops, despite the Big Box competition. These didn’t disappear until the internet came along with Amazon and Alibris.
Now even the Big Box stores are closing. Popular, accessible bookstores lasted about 40 years, from 1970 to 2010.
And now the department stores*, newssrands**, and hardware stores don’t carry books anymore.
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except for Target, it seems
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*when you can find them, anymore.
I shudder to think of our upcoming Brave New World, where all media are delivered electronically right to our doorstep (if not directly into our brains), while we vegetate in our little isolated cocoons. And yes I resemble that remark…
That is amazingly short-sighted.
I honestly don’t know what I would have done in their place, however, if the idea is to keep a brick-and-mortar bookstore viable into the middle part of this century-all the neato bells-and-whistles you mentioned probably would only delay the inevitable.
Amazon drinks their milkshake!
I love to go to a local book store and I would hate to see Borders go under. However, it isn’t too hard to understand why Amazon is blowing them away. As mentioned up thread, I have a bunch of Borders cards. So I thought I would go this weekend. I need a specific software book. At Amazon it is 32.99.
Borders has it for 49.99 but doesn’t have it locally. OK, I tried to order it and have it shipped to the store. When I pushed that button I got a message that said the feature was temporarily unavailable.
For 17 dollars less I can have it on my door step in two days.
I would say that pretty much sums it up. The inability to respond to market conditions and changing technology. Those that do, make megabucks. Those that don’t, go bankrupt.
I hope everybody who recognizes my name here knows me as a book fanatic. I’m a professional writer and I have over 10,000 books. Those two facts are correlated, but I’d probably have 10,000+ books in any case. I love bookstores and I love browsing and finding books I didn’t know about. I spent time in a used book store today just going through the shelves.
But I can’t give a free pass to every idiot who puts a bunch of books into a store and throws the doors open. At some point you have to look at whether the store’s management is a collection of idiots who abuse everyone in sight, from the employees to the publishers they buy their books from to their customers.
Borders is that collection of idiots. They had a good chain, with good practices, and good customer service. They’ve thrown that all away. They’ve been cutting back on staff for years and particularly have made the middle management, the people who do the work of keeping the stores alive, a target. They’ve cut back on product, with huge losses on the music sections that once were features, and have diminished the number of books they keep on the shelves and the length of time they stay there, more so than others. They cut amenities so that stores are no longer pleasant places to spend time in. Their business practices have been horrendous. They have too many overly expensive long-term leases for unproductive stores. They have enormous debts yet when they last had money they spent it on stock buybacks instead of reducing the outstanding loans. They blew the Internet, and their online efforts have been pathetic. They’ve known about all these problems for years, and make them worse each and every worse.
If there is a business that deserves to go under because it’s a badly-run business, it’s Borders. I can’t understand how it stays open. When they first came to town, they were better than the independents. Now the independents are gone and they’re terrible. I don’t have it in me to mourn for them. They’re their own worst enemy, not Amazon.
Exapno you speak wisdom. I worked at HQ from 1998-2004 (most of that time in the online division in various capacities, in fact I was there the day they turned on Borders.com), and you pretty much nailed it.
I remember Borders missing the Internet so badly that they spent most of the last decade in an alliance with Amazon handing their storefront. I never understood why I should want to go through Borders.com when I could get the same things, often for less, through the Amazon.com front that looked exactly the same. Especially since there seemed to be no way to actually use the Borders site to do anything useful, like say free shipping to my local store for pickup.
B&N is in the process of shutting down their four-story flagship store at Lincoln Center because they can’t afford the rent increase. Now if I want to buy books I’m going to have to go down to Union Square like some kind of beatnik. :rolleyes:
Borders shut down their store downtown here. There’s a B&N between the bus stop and my house that I always stop in to browse, but every time I go in there lately, there are less and less books. Frankly, it doesn’t matter that much to me if they both go down, even though I’ll feel slightly sorry for the rest of y’all. There will always be Powell’s.
Last year Megan Whalen Turner’s Conspiracy of Kings came out, and I was totally excited. I also had to buy thank-you cards, so a couple of days after the release date I went to Hallmarks, and then to the Borders next door.
The Borders had nicer thank-you cards than the Hallmarks, but since I’d already bought them from Hallmarks I didn’t need them anymore, thanks. They did not have Turner’s book, which while not a bestseller was not exactly a bottom-of-the-list title (Turner won a Newberry Honor for the first in the series, of which this is the fourth, and they’ve consistently been showing up in all sorts of best-of lists).
That’s when I knew Borders was in trouble.
And I’m the sort of person who never flips through books in a bookstore and then goes to amazon. I’ll buy from amazon if I find out about the book from some other source, but I feel strongly that if I wouldn’t’ve known about the book if not for the bookstore, the bookstore should get the sales credit. But now I go to the independent bookstore (which is where I got CoK).
Even though I live 700 miles from Portland, I have spent many, many hours in Powell’s over the years, and consider it a Portland “must-do” on each and every visit.
That said, are they doing OK?
The property that they occupy must be worth a fortune, and I always notice that they are never really crowded with shoppers, even on their busiest days.
I sure hope that they are still there for many decades to come…
As great as both Strands (NYC) and City Lights (San Francisco) are, Powell’s is my choice for America’s best bookstore.
And now you can find damn near anything you could hope for, even obscure and out of print books, via Amazon and other Internet dealers. Like it or not, they heyday of mall and big box bookstores is over; only niche stores that can offer particular expertise and selection can offer something that can’t be had more accessibly online. This is the way of things; as “five and dime” stores like Woolworths and Ben Franklin gave way to K-Mart and Walmart, which have subsequently given up market to upscalers like Target and online vendors like Overstock.com, things change. What Amazon.com offers, quite frankly, is a superior service in terms of information, accessibility, and breadth of offerings compared to brick and mortar offerings.
I can order books through Amazon.com and have them delivered to any address in the continental United States that I couldn’t find except in a major technical university bookstore or a dedicated architectural bookstore like Hennessey+Ingalls. And even living in Southern California, it is less costly and more efficient for me to order a book on architecture or urban planning from Amazon.com than it is for me to drive to Santa Monica to go to H+I. Bemoan the loss of Borders all you want, but the end result is more information and better access in addition to more convenience.
Stranger
I always enjoyed the Borders in Glendale, CA. It is on the corner and it has the cool glass walled atrium on the second floow with comofrtable chairs and tons of natural light, overlooking the busy street below. It is primo real estate, assumng it is still there, I moved away a few years ago.
Note, though, that Amazon itself doesn’t carry any (or hardly any) out of print books itself; most of the used stuff is available through… wait for it… actual bookstores! Amazon only carries them as a service.
I imagine that if Amazon wanted to, they could stop doing that to encourage new book sales and stifle the very concept of used books, like the publishers want (a big reason why publishers LOVE e-books, I wager). Not that they want to… at least not right now.
Actually that was the second stage. In the first stage, Borders was committed to an online division. They built a modern, automated fulfillment center across the street from Baker & Taylor (the book distributors) in Memphis, near the Fedex hub, for the purpose of dealing with online orders. They showed us a whole video about it at the 1998 QAHM (Quarterly All Hands Meeting, used to communicate about corporate initiatives, another tradition that ended with the 90s).
IBM ran the original e-commerce platform and they SUCKED. They used Borders to in their ads for the service, which was a &^$#@! joke because they could not do anything right; outages were frequent, and their developers refused to begin development on a ship-to-store service which was requested from DAY ONE by customers.
Then they put a director in charge of online who literally knew nothing about the Internet. It was obvious from the start she was placed there so she could fail and get fired. Which she did, and was.
Then there was a series of failed CEOs that cost the firm a lotlotlot of money in golden parachutes.
Oh god, I’m getting flashbacks.
I would say ship-to-store was the biggest boat that was missed. If that had rolled out in 1999 I think there would be a different picture today. The second-biggest boat-missing was the failure to partner for content with All-Media, which was across the street from Borders.com in Ann Arbor. At that moment in time Borders.com had the chance to become a tastemaker to distinguish it from a warehouser like Amazon.com. By 2000, the fate of the online division was essentially sealed.
Yeah, and I’ve used them to purchase obscure books and to fill in my Verne collection. But
a.) It’s definitely not the same as finding out about new books at a bookstore, no matter that they allow Look Inside and offer selections via some software that manages to not fit my prejudices well. And looking through a library is nothing at all like going through a bookstore.
b.) Amazon is practically an on-line monopoly, and I don’t like only having a monopoly handling all my purchases, for obvious reasons.