Beyond Borders

Mar 21st 2011, in The Economist - by E.G.

AUSTIN, TEXAS

THE saga of the Borders bookstore chain has entered a forlorn new chapter. In December, Borders attempted to buy Barnes & Noble, its biggest (and better) competitor; last month, having failed, it filed for bankruptcy. Many of its stores are now shedding inventory in clearance sales. Borders plans to close more than 200 stores as part of its restructuring, nearly a third of the total.


The fall of Borders is unsurprising, given the rise of Amazon.com and e-books, Borders's lagging approach to e-commerce, and price pressure on sellers. (Some of the industry’s travails are detailed here.) “It’s hard to imagine we’d be feeling nostalgic for Borders, which many small town booksellers believe was a killer for their businesses,” writes Shira Ovide.

So cold. We can spare a little thought for Borders. It has a particular relevance for American small towns and suburbs that isn't apparent in urban centres. In the latter, the chain bookstores are the impersonal monoliths that destroyed small independents by undercutting them on prices. But elsewhere, the arrival of a Borders would mean that a town was finally getting a bookstore, rather than a rack of paperbacks and Sudoku books at the supermarket. (Similarly, while Starbucks might have hurt local coffeeshops in, for example, New York, in rural America it has achieved its stated goal of creating a "third space.”)

On the subject of feeling nostalgic for surprising things, a comment from the new novel "Open City", by Teju Cole. The narrator is a Nigerian-born doctor who spends his evenings walking the streets of New York. He contemplates a Blockbuster store in Harlem and a Tower Records near Lincoln Center, both going out of business:

It wasn’t that I felt sorry for these faceless national corporations; far from it. They had made their profits and their names by destroying smaller, earlier local businesses. But I was touched not only at the passage of these fixtures in my mental landscape, but also at the swiftness and dispassion with which the market swallowed even the most resilient enterprises. Businesses that had seemed unshakable a few years previously had disappeared in the span, seemingly, of a few weeks. Whatever role they played passed on to other hands, hands that would be briefly invincible and would, in their turn, be defeated by unforeseen changes. These survivors would also come to be forgotten.

As it happens, the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center has just closed, to be replaced by a Century 21 discount retailer. I had a conversation about it a few weeks ago with a colleague who lives on the Upper West Side. We were both dejected, because it had a good philosophy section and because, even if it was a chain, a bookstore was consonant with the neighbourhood’s literary history. These stores really do become fixtures in our mental landscapes.


They can’t survive for sentimental reasons, though. I bought my copy of "Open City" at BookPeople, the largest independent bookstore in Texas, which has been a downtown fixture for several decades. In the 1990s, faced with the prospect of a big-block bookstore moving in across the street, the owners commissioned a study on the economic impact of spending money at locally-owned stores rather than at chains. The analysis was convincing. BookPeople stayed. Whole Foods took over the spot across the street. The jilted competitor was Borders.