Borders Books, Dead At 40 443
theodp writes "There will be no storybook ending for Borders. The 40-year-old book seller could start shuttering its 399 remaining stores as early as Friday (store closing map). The Ann Arbor, MI-based chain, which helped pioneer the big-box bookseller concept, is seeking court approval to sell off its assets after it failed to receive any bids that would keep it in business. Hang on to those Borders Midnight Magic Party memories, kids!"
Re:won't be missed (Score:5, Informative)
We've got a Borders here in town... And I won't miss them when they close their doors.
It's been a long time since I was able to go there and buy a book that wasn't on some best-seller list. And they've got more movies, music, calendars, and bookmarks than they have actual books at our store. There's a reason they're going out of business.
They would have gone out of business sooner if they only had books. They added all those other things in an attempt to get people to come in and buy something at least...
Re:Sad (Score:5, Informative)
I don't shop online generally, and refuse to use amazon on principle, so it all suck a bit. If I have to buy books online I tend to use AbeBooks, a collective of independant bookshops.
You do realize that AbeBooks is owned by Amazon.com, don't you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com#Acquisitions [wikipedia.org]
You've got that completely backwards (Score:5, Informative)
I looks like another one that missed that a lobby group for bookshop chains including Angus and Robertson set that policy decades ago and have been lobbying to continue it ever since, right up until at least a few months ago. It was nothing but a barrier of entry to small bookshops that were left with little choice but to buy from the big distributors. It was like that in the 1980s (when I worked in a small technical bookshop) and it's been kept in place ever since purely for the benefit of the chains.
Re:What did you say? (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, you jest about digital information.
Books cannot be locked out based on date
Books do not require an internal power source
Books can survive missing a page or two, devices are less resiliant (scratch the screen, for example)
Books allow for easy notation
Books can be passed on without concerns of format compatibility.
Books cannot be remotely edited, and the various editions actually add to the assorted nature of books. (ooh, a first edition, sweet! but the 3rd edition was where they got rid of the translation errors...)
Books cannot be remotely disabled. (I remember a slogan: read a banned book today! These days, if it was banned it would be gone, end of story)