Huh. A bit of a hijack, but if you’re in San Francisco, check out Green Apple in the Richmond District. It’s not on the same level as, say, Powell’s, but it’s a great little place. There’s a decent amount of stuff that might not be on the shelves, but a lot of that stuff they can ship in from their warehouse for you. They also sell Google eBooks on their website. As far as I can tell, they seem to be doing just fine.
Most of my posts were about Boston, but I also talked about my own immediate area (a separate lament). I thought I’d kept them distinct enough.
There was a Borders about six blocks from my house. I loved having it that close. They closed it down a little over a year ago and while I was in there buying discounted books, I talked with the staff. They were saying back then that things were not good and that if Borders was still around in two years, they’d be surprised.
They just closed the B&N here, leaving Borders as the only large bookstore for miles. So they better not close that one too.
I feel for those of you who enjoy Borders, or just a major outlet where you can peruse titles in person, but Borders has outrageous prices, and I won’t be sad to see them go.
Still there, but they just took out about half of the bookshelves and reduced the inventory. Now the store has large expanses of empty floor. Way to maximize your square footage. There is a HUGE B&N across the street at the Americana mall, I don’t expect that store to be there much longer.
As someone who works for a publishing company whose employees won’t be getting raises/bonuses this year because Borders owes us millions, I say screw 'em.
Another entry in the irony department.
Driving on Rt. 17 in New York a couple of weeks ago, we saw this billboard.
It’s a picture of a dinosaur holding a book, with the legend “We’re not extinct yet!” Coo, we thought. We should stop there.
When we got to the store they were having a going out of business sale.
(Yes, I bought an armload of books at 30% off.)
I’m ambivalent about the situation, because on one hand, they’re obscenely overpriced (at least in this part of the world), but on the other hand, there’s a serious shortage of decent bookshops around and there’s a lot of stuff that you’d never go and look for specifically but might buy if you saw it cheap enough whilst browsing in a book store.
Having said that, though, The Book Depository in the UK sells the same books as Borders for half the price with free shipping, and if I was one of the Borders Australia Senior Management I’d be more than a little embarrassed that my company was getting pwned by an English company on the other side of the planet with a currency worth nearly twice what the Australian one is.
I can only seek solace in that the Borders here in PR are apparently some of their best locations so they may survive. They are IT in the realm of decent browsing bookstores around here, and our surviving indies tend to be not just few and far between but also expensive and understocked (save for books about Angels and Auras and about USA Are Teh Suxx0r)
That’s a bummer. I prefer barns and noble over border’s but as someone who just spent 2.5 hours wandering around a bookstore the death of them will sadden me.
Note that what they’ve filed for is bankruptcy protection. They’re expected to close 150-200 of their 650 (or so) stores and renegotiate their financing. In other words, they’re not shutting down completely. (The biggest problem is that publishers basically stopped shipping books to the stores in December.)
Around here, Barnes and Nobles is a Cadillac, Borders is a Hyundai.
I wish that were the case here. Around here, B & N just closed their only store. We have Borders or nothing. Soon there may be no bookstores at all within 20 miles of my house. And I live in a major metropolitan area. All the independent bookstores here closed years ago.
And that last is because they weren’t paying anyone, right?
I hope this works out. I’d hate to have a world where I couldn’t just run into a book randomly that I didn’t know I wanted to read. Try doing that with a website. Just as the 'net has concentrated the political “echo chamber,” I’d hate for that to happen to books too.
(Then again, maybe I have other “motives” for my opinions - i.e. losing that gift card I got for Christmas. I feel bad for “wasting” the money of others every time I think about it, not to mention my own loss. And it was “only” twenty bucks!)
If a bookstore wants to survive, it needs to make the sale of books incidental to their primary business, whatever that might be.
In that case, it’d no longer be a bookstore, would it? Just a cafe/restaurant/dojo/brothel that also sells a few books…
In fact, forget about the cafe/restaurant/dojo and the books.
I was there for the blackjack, I swear!