Borders throws in the towel, agrees to liquidate; 'a very sad occurrence'

Source: Detroit Free Press

Borders Group threw in the towel this afternoon and agreed to submit a previously announced liquidation plan to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan on Thursday.

The Ann Arbor-based bookseller had been trying to reorganize for five months, but was overwhelmed with debt, losses and changing consumer tastes.

Borders now operates 399 stores and employs approximately 10,700 workers. It has 408 employees at its Ann Arbor headquarters and 473 at its 26 Michigan stores.

“Following the best efforts of all parties, we are saddened by this development,” said Borders Group President Mike Edwards, in a statement. “We were all working hard towards a different outcome, but the headwinds we have been facing for quite some time including the rapidly changing book industry, eReader revolution and turbulent economy have brought us to where we are now.”. . .

Read more: http://www.freep.com/article/20110718/BUSINESS06/110718058/Borders-throws-towel-agrees-liquidate-very-sad-occurrence-?odyssey=mod|breaking|text|FRONTPAGE

---

Inevitable, but still very sad. A lot of folks are losing their jobs.

And that's a lot of jobs lost.

Very sad.

I preferred them to Barnes & Noble, but it doesn't matter now, I guess.

It's too bad that technology, and probably the economy, is killing the book industry.

But that is the way technology moves forward, and yes a lot of people will be thrown out of work.


Sad.

as much it's a change in the way they're read and/or sold. First there was Amazon about ten years ago, which offered the same books as your corner store for a significantly lower price, and more recently we have the Kindle, iPad, and other e-readers, allowing the convenience and portability of entire home libraries. And with improved, more natural displays and thumbing/interface, and battery life, I think the industry will continue to evolve. This is not to mention the developments in databases, data collection, and other developments for mobile apps and websites to target specific books to readers according to their tastes and interests.

But I like book stores as well and the physical feel of books in general. I have wasted hours going through sections at book stores sipping coffee. In many ways it's easier going through shelves of book stores, thumbing through them and sometimes finding things you didn't expect, than going through an online catalog.

I am a book guy- I like the feel and smell of a good book. Technology is great, but technology can also be easily manipulated. They can keep their readers, I will just head to half price books.

Call me old-fashioned, but I love books . . . and those things aren't books.

My 89 year old dad has an e-reader and loves it, but he is very concerned about what will happen to his 'collection' when he dies. It's a good question - he paid for those 'books', but can he list them as property to be bequeathed?

that when he dies the license expires. What really troubles me is that, since the book is in software form, it can be altered. Let's say you have "Grapes of Wrath" or "The Jungle" on your reader. These books somehow end up on a censorship list. You don't know this. You log in to download a book, they scan your system, and see you have a banned book on your reader. Only takes a second to make it disappear. "Fahrenheit 451" taken to the next extreme level.

He only owns the 'right' to read them. I guess we could copy them to his computer hard drive (need to figure out how), but I'm not sure we could up-load them to his e-reader again.

I realize that he's not paying for a tangible object, but he is still paying (and frankly, sometimes quite a bit for a collection of bits and bytes and storage space on a gigantic server somewhere) and it seems just a bit strange that the company can assume such complete control over his 'collection'.

I suspect that there is a fair amount of 'editing' built into the digitization process that we don't know about; a friend who has a Kindle (and a PhD in British Literature) noticed that her supposedly copyright free version of an 18th century text was lacking in a few places.

I don't like the vagueness of the law on this issue (and detest reading long passages on a screen). I'll be sticking with the old style until they stop making them (hopefully I'll be too old to care by then).

that is the whole problem I have with electronic books and music. And you have to be a lawyer to understand that End User License Agreements. 99% of the music on my iPod is imported from CDs I own, and all my books are real. I don't ever see myself changing in that regard.

Sad to see books stores dying out. Other than Barnes & Noble, there's not many stores to get books. Stores like Target or Walmart have an extremely limited book selection.

Additionally, it's another 11,000 people who will be unemployed, including a large amount here in MI.

but I didn't get it because of Borders' financial problems. They came out and said a good while ago, however, that they would still be around for the e-book market. I think they need to come down on the prices of the e-books, though. Some of them are just as much or nearly as much as a regular book.

They seem to think they can continue to charge print-book prices for something that only exists digitally.

Self-published authors normally won't go above $2.99 on their books. People not used to eBooks are going to have to learn that just because some title is priced at only $0.99, doesn't automatically mean it's not worth buying.

This guy has a great blog for writers just getting started in eBooks, and includes some explanation about eBook pricing :)

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com

We very much miss our neighborhood Border's; it was a clean,
well-stocked shop full of nice booksellers. On that note, we're
sorry to see the ultimate end of Borders.

And yet, Borders and B&N are in large part responsible for the
demise of the independent bookseller; it seems to me that it was
over a decade ago that the last independent seller of new books
closed in our area. So there's also a certain amount of "what goes
around comes around" in our feelings.

Well, at least we still have our B&N and a huge used-book super-
store to keep fed our need to physically fondle books.

Tesha

plus two more independent used books store in the area. I am lucky.

is a step closer to the Republican dream, morons who can't critically think.

of higher education, plus the continued attacks on public education and I believe one thing- they want uneducated proles. In the not too distant future, only the wealthy will be able to afford education.

Switching over to digital media makes books cheaper and more accessible.

Blockbuster stores closing doesn't mean people stopped renting movies. They just do it differently now.

I look forward to getting a kindle or similar item. I love books, but they are heavy and easily damaged. Being able to store 10,000 on something the size of a magazine is a dream come true.

I love my local used bookstore! I get my books there, from Amazon or PaperBack Swap. I'm a poor graduate student & don't pay retail for books or music.

That said, I feel for those who are about to lose their jobs.

I buy most of my books used now from abebooks.

are small ones run typically by a woman whose kids are out of school and some are the bigger stores selling a lot of discount and remainder books. I have seen these show up in the last year or so. There are millions of books around. I have a used book biz but have added some new titles in the art and history area. I think smaller independent book shops still have a place. And of course there are the college and university book stores and the book shops connected with the big art museums. There must be more to the Borders collapse than just the "advance" of technology or the slower economy.

added the gifty chotsky stuff. They took the whole center of the store and did that. I used to be able to take the kids there and they'd buy books to read. Now they're just interested in the stuffed animals, toys, legos, etc. that they sell. If I wanted to take them to a toy store, Toys-R-Us is right next door.

I love the little mom/pop bookstores. We went in several on our vacation. In Manteo, my daughter bought a Russian dictionary to help in her freshman college year, and the owner started speaking in Russian to her, translating as he went. My daughter thought it was great.

The Internet has killed a lot of retail outlets (bookstores, cd stores, etc) and eliminated a lot of jobs that just aren't being up for by amazon and downloading. Borders is just another example of this at work. Throw in the print industry and you have a real mess. The hit the Internet made on so many factors of the economy has never been properly addressed and we're still trying to sort it out.

The loss of so many retail and service jobs is especially bad when one considers that the manufacturing base left the country years ago due to NAFTA, GATT, etc. Nothing is made in the U.S. anymore.

These two factors are not being addressed. The U.S. economy has seen ups and downs for decades and usually bounces back. This time, there's no job base and that's why we're seeing the slowest turnaround since the depression.

Conditions are unique to this recession and no one is offering the real solutions needed - namely, ending the corporate trade deals. You obviously can't poof us back to the pre-digital age, but having other industries in the U.S. to compensate could help.

Until that's done, no amount of stimulus spending, deficit hysteria, tax cuts or whatever else DC proposes is going to help.

**wink**

Amazon has become the dominant book-seller in the industry, with very little overhead and no brick-and-mortar presence.

Barnes and Noble has saved itself through its remarkably popular Nook platform. But they are running on an outdated business model, one that is reminscent of Blockbuster.

i think it might be the atmosphere they created in their stores that is appealing. similar to the apple stores which do well.

the nook is a good idea and shows they are trying to keep up with changes to stay in business which blockbuster did not do.

It could indicate that alot of people are just sitting around, reading books, taking up space, but not purchasing those books. Or spending most of their day at Starbucks instead.

I really do believe that the brick and mortar mega-bookstore will be going the way of the dodo soon. It was a good business model years ago, but things change, and Amazon has done a terrific job of becoming the dominant bookseller in the industry without a brick and mortar presence. I compared them to Blockbuster because I see an old business model that was once popular years ago. The differences are is that Barnes and Noble has a much more effective online presence than Blockbuster ever did, and now Barnes and Noble has gotten in the hardware-selling business, which will provide another revenue stream.

how they do overall.

i think they might also do well with gift cards also.

i don't know if the stores can never be profitable again. there might need to be some changes made. but i think a lot of people enjoy the experience of being in the book store. and while e-books will get more popular if there is a book someone really loves think they will want the actual paperbook to keep.

amazon and other online places are good if you know what you want. but sometimes you just enjoy seeing what there is and and getting something you never heard of before.

i always found borders to be too expensive. this was even before amazon became popular and we had many other book stores.

my ignorance.

I think we are seeing more consumers use the internet for their media content needs, from Amazon to Netflix to Itunes.

I worked for Waldenbooks for two and half years, and I'm sure a few people I know will lose their jobs.

I'm not surprised though. They had some horrible management people who were considered great leaders when they were really ugly, vicious, backstabbing, arrogant creeps and not as smart as they thought. I'm sure a lot of bad choices by these types helped. I quit without another job because of one of them. That's just the way it is, but of course these job losses will be used against the Democratic President.

when Borders opened in many areas they caused the shuttering of many small book stores and hardly anyone seemed to notice. I look at Borders, Books A Million and Barnes and Noble as the Walmarts of the book business.

Yes, ebooks are here to stay but that is affecting everyone. Meanwhile, my favorite used book store seems to be thriving although they have cut their hours a bit.

they won't disappear over night of course. Just like you can still buy vinyl records.

But they will become more and more of a niche item.

The transition will be rough for a lot of people but it will also create new opportunities. Hopefully libraries will buy up much of their surplus. That's still one area where paper books will be difficult to replace.