What We Should Learn from the Collapse of Borders

Posted by Joseph Esposito ⋅ Nov 29, 2011 - the scholarly kitchen

Image by markhillary via Flickr

The collapse of Borders is more than the failure of just another retail operation. It’s also a wake-up call to any publisher who takes its business ecosystem for granted, whether that publisher is in books, journals, or anything else.
But first, let’s spend a minute on the life and times of Borders, which is an amazing tale. One way to look at the demise of Borders is as perhaps the loudest signal to date that the disruptive forces now penetrating every corner of the publishing industry are not waiting for some far-off time before they take their place at center stage. Up until now, to a very great extent disruptive technology has been domesticated. This is the case with research journals, for example, which are largely dominated in electronic form by the very same publishers that dominated the game when it was all print. And of course we have all been treated many times to interviews with luminaries, whether industry figures or authors or even the occasional celebrity who simply must offer an opinion on every topic, who pronounce that “there will always be print.” Yeah, right. In fact we have known all along that this play will come to the end: at some point the hero of print will fall on his sword and the digital demon will step forward, proclaim the new era, and invite us all to download a copy of Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity.
But Borders! That’s a hard one to ignore. In one stroke over 500 retail outlets disappeared, which, even at the end, still comprised over 10% of U.S. trade book sales and a significant percentage of the sales of even scholarly publishers. It was not so long ago that Borders’ market share was double that; combine that figure with Barnes & Noble’s 30% (some put that figure lower), and you had one-half of the U.S. trade business. (Amazon, at 12-15% was the number 3 player.)
Read the full piece at the scholarly kitchen.