Goodbye, Borders
It’s always a little scary when a major retailer, one that’s been around long enough that it’s hard to remember a time they weren’t there, goes under.
Yet the liquidation of the Borders chain only makes obvious what’s been clear to a lot of people for some time: that the era of the super-mega-bookstore is nearing its end. In his farewell statement, Borders President Mike Edwards mentions the “headwinds” the company has “been facing for quite some time, including the rapidly changing book industry, e-reader revolution, and turbulent economy.” It could be that the phrase “rapidly changing” is the most telling one here, for if the problems of Borders can be boiled down to a single notion, it’s that: the industry has changed faster than Borders could, or was willing to.
Although it’s a bit sad, I can’t say I feel any particular emotion about the closing of Borders-and I say that as someone who has spent countless thousands of dollars there over the years. I certainly feel terribly for the nearly 11,000 people working for the company who will soon be collecting unemployment checks. But in terms of the entity itself known as Borders Books and Music, it was really just another voracious corporate conglomerate more than happy to push its lesser competitors out of business.
Really, before anyone ratchets up the violins for Borders too much, it might be good to remember just how many fine smaller stores the company drove from the world. I remember that when I first arrived in Washington D.C. in 1991, the bookshop of choice for people like me was Chapters, a self-defined Literary Bookstore in the heart of downtown. It wasn’t large, but the store’s stock was practically hand-picked for someone like me: literary and mainstream fiction, poetry, drama, classics, literary biographies. There was plenty of nonfiction of all types, and art and travel books. But the unwary customer walking into Chapters to find the latest bestseller by Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel would have walked away disappointed. Chapters did not have such things. The store catered to a clientele that was educated and, if I may use this loaded word, sophisticated. They hosted many poetry and prose readings, which were often packed with listeners; it was there I first met some of my literary heroes, including poets Donald Hall and C.K. Williams. It was truly a wonderful bookstore.
And then the Borders opened a few blocks away, at 18th and L Streets NW, and Chapters was doomed. They lasted for a few years; the last time I went there was for a reading by Lyle Leverich, the biographer of Tennessee Williams, in, I think, 1997. I hadn’t been there in ages. The shop was on the ropes then; the reading was attended by exactly three people, including myself. Chapters closed, then reopened for a while in another D.C. location, but died there too.
Similar stories can be told about countless small bookstores across the country-how the death knell sounded as soon as Borders moved in nearby.
And yet I liked Borders a lot, right from the first time I set foot in one in Rockville, Maryland, in, I believe, 1992. How could a book lover not love Borders? The huge selection, the low prices, the comfortable chairs to sit in and read? Borders outlets were, in their way, wonderful bookstores too. And they, along with Barnes and Noble, ruled the roost in the world of bookstores for some fifteen years, from the late ’80s/early ’90s until around 2003 or so-at which time Amazon began to take over, with its unparalleled prices and convenience; it would have become dominant sooner if it hadn’t taken lots of people years to come online. Amazon began in 1995, amidst widespread predictions that it couldn’t possibly succeed. And indeed, the upstart company lost tremendous amounts of money in the early years. But millions of people had no access to it-including my wife and I, who didn’t go online until 1999. As the world grew increasingly wired, Amazon began to thrive, and more and more people began to use Borders as a place simply to audition books-to look at them and decide if they wanted to buy them. If they did, they replaced the book on the Borders shelf and went home to place their order on Amazon.
And of course Amazon has provided the world with the breakthrough e-reader, the Kindle, after years of failure by other companies.
I get the sense that Borders never really knew how to deal with the challenge of Amazon. They began offering good coupons online, coupons which at least made it feasible to buy books in their stores, but millions of people never knew about them and were left with the impression that buying something at Borders was necessarily much more expensive than buying the same item on Amazon. And, to its peril, the company clearly dragged its feet in the e-reader revolution, buying a minority interest in the Kobo only very late in the game, after the Kindle had taken over and B & N’s rival, the Nook, had established itself as a viable alternative. By the time Borders got around to promoting the Kobo, there just wasn’t much room for it in the marketplace.
The very public financial problems also facing B & N raise the question, of course, of whether the physical bookstore is soon to be a thing of the past altogether. (I’m talking about shops that sell only new books; used bookstores are another matter entirely.) It’s interesting to speculate what might happen if in the next few years B & N fails as well. Could we see a return of the small, independently-operated bookstore, with a limited, focused selection aimed at a particular clientele-like the late, lamented Chapters once was? It could be. But I suspect the stores will look different than they used to. For one thing, they won’t stock hardcovers-many bestsellers now actually move more e-units than they do hardbacks, and that trend is certain to continue. Paperbacks, then? Could we really see a return to the kind of stores that existed when I was growing up, little corner shops known casually as “paperback shacks”?
Perhaps. At least for a while. But with the e-reader explosion I wouldn’t expect such stores to last more than a few years. An Associated Press article on the Borders closing by Mae Anderson quotes one customer as saying, “I’ll miss [Borders], but I’m not going to buy another paperback in my life. There’s no reason to.” As with everything else in the book business, the future of brick-and-mortar bookstores is very much unknown.
About six years ago a Borders opened in downtown Silver Spring, a mere ten-minute walk from our front door. It became a constant hangout for my wife and me, separately and together, though in truth while we spent countless hours there among the books and CDs and magazines, each year we bought less and less actual merchandise from them. When we both got our Kindles, that was pretty much curtains for us and Borders, other than the occasional magazine or closeout book. We still went there constantly, but to browse, to breathe in the atmosphere and ambience of a huge shop full of books, not to spend money. As much as I liked the store, it increasingly came to resemble an outdated white elephant in the fast-changing world of the 21st century.
My wife and I showed up to the store on the evening of the very first day it opened. It was packed with people, gratifyingly so, and it looked on that happy night as if Borders would have a long and bright future in Silver Spring. I remember walking past one customer, a young woman who, arm-in-arm with her boyfriend or husband, said excitedly to him: “We just walked to Borders! How decadent is that?” I wonder how many books she’s bought from Borders lately.
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