Border's Noble Idea: Will Anybody Come?

Has it really come down to a megalithic Barnes & Borders with a scattering of independent bookstores struggling to hold on? Opinion is basically split down the middle in a Wall Street Journal online poll that asks readers if Borders will be stronger if it buys Barnes & Noble. As of very early this morning, 50.1% of 1,344 respondents say yes. But you've got to wonder if this is not a consolidation of buggy-whip shops, no?

Pershing Square Capital Management LP, which is Borders' largest shareholder, has proposed a takeover of the larger Barnes & Noble for almost a billion dollars. I'm sure that Pershing Square founder William Ackman has a much better idea of how to make a buck than I do. But as Morningstar analyst Peter Wahlstrom told Bloomberg's Matt Townsend about the proposed deal earlier this week, "I don't think it solves all that much."

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E-book readers are certainly one reason. I've got Amazon Kindle loaded on my iPod Touch, and I recently acquired an iPad, and from time to time, I'll just download a PDF or read something like a Scribed file on my computer.

One commenter at the WSJ asks that you consider a book delivered in three formats: Sumerian cuneiform, a paperback and a $250 Nook. He posits that while the first two still will be useable in 50 years, the last will be sitting next to your VCR in a moldy corner of the basement. True enough, I guess. But those digitized words, unlike cuneiform, will still be comprehensible to us all and no doubt will be delivered on wide variety of digital devices that cost nowhere near today's $250.

But it's not just e-readers that are killing bookstores. It all comes down to you and me. How much time do we actually spend browsing for books in the bricks-and-mortar aisles anymore?

Once upon a time, browsing was among my favorite activities. I spent many a lunch hour at the Barnes & Noble flagship stores that were across from each other on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Or uptown at the gorgeous Scribner's. Or in the stalls that sat in the middle of some side hallways of Grand Central Terminal, where you could find a copy of the Evergreen Review without travelling to Greenwich Village. Or at the Strand, perhaps the last dowager standing of the great used bookstores that used to populate the area around Fourth Avenue.

I also spent hours in the barns at the Owl Pen in rural Greenwich, N.Y., where I used to correspond with the owner by (postal) mail when I was looking for particular volumes. I couldn't wait to check out Powell's when I got to Portland, Ore., and always looked forward to a visit to the Northshire in Manchester, Vt., where, I admit, I acquired a bound copy of memorials to Horace Greeley that no man in his right mind would buy, no less read.

Any story out about Barnes & Noble or Borders in recent years seems to have an air of desperation about it. Executives resigning.  Attempts to develop proprietary e-book readers to compete with Amazon and then Apple and now Google. Disappointing sales.  Fights over stock. Attempts to lure customers with amenities that they are now getting in their own living roomsLayoffs.  Plans to reinvent the very meaning of what a "book" store is.

But when it some down to the root cause of why you and I aren't making the trek to bookstores anymore, I think one word really says it all. Amazon.

3 comments about "Border's Noble Idea: Will Anybody Come? ".
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  1. Amy Fanter from Odds On Promotions, December 9, 2010 at 12:28 p.m.

    Going to San Francisco this weekend where I will make my annual pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore and spend an obscene amount of money on books that will take me a year to read. Call me a Luddite, but I will always prefer the serendipity of the physical browse at a well run shop to what some algorithm serves me based on my “previous purchases”.

  2. David Aaker from www.davidaaker.com, December 9, 2010 at 2:54 p.m.

    In the 1960s the checkless society was just around the corner and fifty years later we are still writing checks. I suspect that there will be a segment that still prefers bookstores for all or part of their book buying, still prefers hard copies, and will support an industry--the problem is that B&N and Borders have built huge facilities that require scale and it is not clear that such a tact will be the bookstore survivor.

  3. Thom Forbes from T.H. Forbes Co., December 9, 2010 at 9:06 p.m.

    Did I mention that I still have a 1974 edition of the ABA's "A Manual on Bookselling: How To Open & Run Your Own Bookstore"? I hope you're all right. In my heart of hearts, I'm sitting behind a cashbox reading some obscure poet while the customers merrily browse.

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