Borders No More

One of the first things we did as a family upon moving to Brookfield 18 years ago was to look for a good, local bookstore. Slim pickings: there was a small one near the old Caldor Plaza (now Kohl's), which subsequently moved to Newtown and later went out of business; and the used-book Paperback Exchange, which still exists on Federal Road. But if we wanted a decent selection, we'd have to visit the Waldenbooks in the Danbury Mall, or better yet, the Bank Street bookstore in New Milford, if not the Hickory Stick in Washington Depot.

Which is why, within weeks of settling into our new house on Route 133, I emailed Borders Books' headquarters saying, “Please open a store in our area!” And by golly, within a year the company did... and we finally had a place to buy and browse for books, to hang out, to read to our kids in the children's area on a rainy Sunday. With Home Depot having opened nearby not long before (or was it after?), life was good.

And that's why it was sad to learn on Wednesday, from , that Borders had declared bankruptcy, and that the Federal Road store in Danbury — just across the Brookfield line — will close in April, as will stores (according to the Wall Street Journal, which published the complete list) in Wilton, Southbury, Milford, Simsbury and Manchester. I've been to each, since they were great places to stop for coffee, or check email, while schlepping children to athletic events, or just for breaking up a long car ride. I signed copies of my book Roadster at one of those Borders in 1998... though can't remember which, since the harrowing drive up there (my wasn't made for interstate cruising) is more deeply seared in my mind.

The odd thing? I avoid shopping in chain stores whenever possible, because I prefer character to convenience — I'd rather take my chances with a java-shop latte than an assembly-line one, which is why I hung out at Newtown's late, much-missed , and often stop by Sandy Hook's Demitasse Cafe. But Borders was a different kind of bookstore — or was supposed to be, at least, when I first wrote about it in 1995, back when I was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times. The article is very dated — Borders, I wrote 16 years ago, was becoming “the bookstore chain against which others are measured,” and belied the idea that “the era of the printed text is coming to an end.”

I'm hyperlinking the L.A. Times article, above, in part because it underlines a major reason behind Borders' dire financial straits. Most information, today, is available in digital form, and hundreds of millions of people presume information should be “free”... meaning many people (me included) won't shop in person for a $25 book they can buy for $5 online, or perhaps download for free.  And sometimes, download for free illegally — partly because the line between legal and illegal isn't as obvious as you'd think. The Times, for example, bought “first serial rights” to my Borders article... but for years has posted it online without my permission, profiting from the ad sales the article draws and in direct violation of my copyright.

Yes, a lawsuit has been filed, and not a minor one: I'm one of a handful of plaintiffs in Reed Elsevier, Inc., et al. v . Muchnick, et al., a case that has already been up to the U.S. Supreme Court on procedural grounds... and may return there, because the litigation is at the red-hot center of digital-copyright issues.

Borders, to some degree, has been hoisted on its own petard, because the company was built on its early mastery of back-office computing — the ability to crunch numbers so well it could predict demand on a store-by-store basis, could make inventories much more efficient. The chain hoped, essentially, that by tracking sales so finely and quickly, and instantly returning items to publishers that didn't sell, it could turn each Borders into a truly individual, independent-style store — or as a Borders marketing VP put it, one that began to “resemble the customer.”

The fly in the ointment? Amazon.com went "live" online just as Borders started to grow and by 1999 was so successful that Time magazine named Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, Person of the Year. Bookselling would never be the same... a major reason both Borders and its major competitor, Barnes & Noble, have in recent years put more emphasis on coffee and magazines.

“Category killer?"  Yes: a Morgan Stanley analyst predicts Amazon will generate annual sales of $100 billion by 2015 — higher than Wal-Mart — largely because Amazon, too, is expanding from its bookselling base into... just about everything else.

As a long-time publishing reporter and book writer, I'm sorry to see Borders leave town — it was a good, comfortable store, and a nice place to meet people for a muffin and cappucino. But history isn't on Borders' side: we are increasingly an image-and-entertainment-oriented culture, where sports and movies, music and outdoor actitivies, put books in the shade. Possibly that's a good thing... but I doubt it.