Borders calling it quits
Even though, it was probably inevitable, this is sad to see. Ann Arbor will take a hit from this. Good luck to all those losing jobs.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527023036619045764543537685502…
yes, I have all my books on my nook at a fraction of the weight
I loved going to the State Street store as a kid in the 70's, then they blew up and somewhere around the K-Mart buyout they lost me.
In the 90's Borders ravaged independent bookstores across the country. Their strategy was to open a store just down the street from a successful local shop and use their distribution channels to keep prices low, and just siphon customers. What Walmart did to downtowns across America, Borders did to book shops.
Thousands of former bookstore owners, employees, and customers are enjoying some schadenfreude today.
Ebooks are the future. Tablets and Kindles will only continue to climb in sales!!!
while the demand for books in print is decreasing, I feel like it will never reach zero ... perhaps the print book will relegated to a small, niche role, but it seems far-fetched to imagine that it will ever truly become extinct.
& so it would follow for book stores, too - maybe big chains can't stick around, but there ought to be demand enough for little shops here & there ... then again, I know nothing about economics (I regret not taking more econ classes).
the bigger question I ask myself from time to time is: who does advancing technology benefit most? this seems to be an example of a new technology (e-readers & digital format texts) resulting in convenience & affordability for consumers, more profit for corporations, but fewer jobs for the masses.
mgoblog community, you are a pretty clever group - please feel free to teach me anything useful on this topic.
edit: typos
AFAIK books require economies of scale to be profitable. If placing an order at a publishing house for a new, say, John Grisham book costs $5 per book when 1m books are ordered, that cost would skyrocket if 1,000 books were ordered. Then you have a situation where nearly everyone has an ereader of some kind, Amazon will sell the ebook for $10 and the book at the local bookstore costs $50. Obviously that's a very elementary example with made up numbers, but the idea is there.
Disintermediation was the phenomenon that essentially killed Borders. Once Direct-to-consumer bookselling (not to mention all other media) was cheap and profitable, Borders was more or less on the clock.
Purchasing power is another big advantage that, say, Amazon would have over Borders, as mentioned. It's certainly how Wal-Mart was able to systematically murder Main Street.
You're definitely right about that (and I think that the paper book market will move more to Wal Mart and Target than speciality stores) but I was more explaining how the demand for books might hit zero, instead of demand being an asymptote. Once the printers are taking all small orders, price is going to rise exponentially and very few people are going to pay twice or three times as much for a book as they do today when a substitute is available. In that scenario we could be left with virtually no books being published on paper.
Eventually, e-books will more or less be the rule, although I don't think you'll see print go away. It is, after all, "storage" of a sort. I can see a point in the future when the printed word is really only found in the repositories known as "libraries" and in the offices of nostalgic folks such as myself, but virtually all day-to-day reading is done on a digital device. I am nearly at that point now in my professional life - all the specifications and manuals I reference I have linked on my iPad.
I don't think there will ever be no paper books, but there is a conceivable way it could happen, which is what the original guy was asking (or at least that's what I thought he was asking). I'm still doing everything for school the old fashioned way, and it's hard to imagine a time when that won't be the case.
We have now the technology for that very thing to occur, but there will always be a physical book to reference for whatever you are researching, in my opinion. You simply won't have to go to the trouble of finding it at a store or in a library ever again basically, although the facilities would be there.
Borders was already on life support before e-books took off. And besides, e-books only account for, and this is based on one unscientific study, 25% of the market. Sure it's growing, but we're still a ways off from books being replaced by e-books.
Borders died because of overexpansion and the high cost of maintaining stock for so many locations. Just like Circuit City. This was exacerbated by Borders' policy of letting you sit there are read through the books without buying anything. Because who wants to buy something that's been read through twice, as new?
As far as e-books are concerned, IMO they'll replace mass market paperbacks...you know, the $6.99 things whose spines crack so easily, have cheesy cover artwork and look terrible on your shelves. That's a big chunk of the market. But I seriously doubt this is the end of paper books...having been around for centuries upon centuries makes it a shade different from CDs...
You're right that e-books didn't kill Borders right now. There bigger problem was the poor choice in expansion and also a lack of ever developing an internet presence (seriously, Borders didn't develop their own website until 2009!!!!).
People should note that the margins on e-books are paper thin (pun intended). Many of Border's e-readers were sold with a $0.50 margin over cost (so once you factor in stocking, etc. they are sold at a loss). I don't know what the margin is exactly on e-books, but it's pretty thin too. It's definetly a commodity transaction that is based on large bulk sales. So it doesn't make much money for anyone.
While e-books have outpaced hardbacks, paperbacks still greatly outsell e-books.
I can understand some of the draw of ebooks, I still can't say I like them. Almost every book I've bought in the last couple years I've lent out to someone who was interested in reading it after I was finished. And I've borrowed a book series myself before then turning around and buying it because I liked it so much.
I know several people, including my girlfriend, with kindles, but after trying to use one I was left unimpressed.
If they are a close friend and not a casual acquaintance, you just swap kindles. I agree, it would be really nice if they added a lending feature.
Ok I will say it, I cannot wait for the day that actual paper books die. They are environmentally poor, expensive to produce, and take up a fair amount of physical space to store.
This is natural selection. in its purest form.
I will miss bookstores (worked at one for 5 years in college) but like others have said with the cost and convience of eBooks...you cant help but change.
I still have not purchased a Kindle as I am waiting on a good Android tablet to emerge during Black Friday sales this year but once that happens my days of packing 6 books in my luggage are over for a weeks vacation are over (I read 6 books on our honeymoon; nothing like the ocean, a book and a Bubbakeg to keep your beer cold).
My wife worked at a Borders as a supervisor for a few years. And although I'm said to see an Ann Arbor based company go, according to her stories on how they ran the company, they were always asking for failure. There's no room for a company in any industry that cares so little for their employees and customers.
I was there today and bought a book...
They are going to have some sales/liquidation stuff going on Friday. If you wanna get into Borders, you probably need to do it soon!
The market is probably not quite set for this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/18/kindle_textbook_rental/
Renting a book sounds great, but 30 days? The reduction in price probably wont' be 80% if you need it for 3-4 months.
but Borders deserved to die. They should have been bankrupt years ago, I'm amazed they kept operating this long. I worked at the Union Bookstore a few years ago, and bestsellers were always 30 percent off retail at release. Borders would sometimes have 15 percent off or 30 percent off of not as many bestsellers, and would refuse to discount DVDs or music. A business model of "charge 20% more than everyone else and expect people to buy it just because it's Borders" could never survive.