Another Borders Post-mortem

This guy blames out-sourcing their online stuff to Amazon.

"I think the biggest thing Borders did wrong is when they turned over their online business to Amazon," Davidowitz tells The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task and Breakout's Jeff Macke in the accompanying interview. "That move finished them off because they gave away the future."

While I'm sure it didn't help, neither was it 'giving away the future'.
The future is digital - their late, half-assed stab at an ereader was what gave that away.

That's the endgame of all this hand-wringing about physical bookshops- will digital erosion of an already badly undermined business model allow for the existence of retail bookselling on other than a makework for retired elderly proprietor level? Will it become the sole province of hobbyists, incapable of sustaining a thriving business, however well run?

I find the heavy tint of nostalgia permeating much of the Borders coverage surprising. Not from the customer end- the reading public has a profoundly romanticized view of the business, as regular readers of my True Customer Tales know. But it's weird to read stuff like this from presumably hardened businessmen-

Davidowitz is not giving up on the U.S. bookstore either.
"The retail business is a business of change," but there is still a room for the bookstore in the hearts and lives of many Americans who use them as a place for meetings, gatherings and to just hang out with friends. Davidowitz says the bookstore is going nowhere soon, but we can expect to see a lot fewer of them.

Is it ill mannered to me to wonder what the profit margins are on being a space for meetings, gatherings and to hang out with friends?
Does he think bookstores charge a cover and sell booze?

And from another paen to Borders-

I credit browsing the magazine racks at the bookstores (“Already, I was into politics, but didn’t know much about the world outside Time and Newsweek. Here was a store with six magazine racks and unfamiliar offerings like The Nation and National Review and In These Times and Reason”) of yore for teaching me about the world. Here I perused issues of Foreign Affairs and Mother Jones and who knows whatever else. The world seems small when you’re young.
But even later when my magazine reading went on line, for years in DC my go-to time-killer was to spend some time in a Borders flipping through graphic novels or books. And I would feel sentimental about abusing the place, and usually make sure to buy things there. I love shopping online, but I was actually quite resistant to the original Amazon business of buying books online because I wanted to support the idea of a bookstore. And to me a bookstore meant not a quaint little dusty shop somewhere, but precisely a Borders or a Barnes & Noble.

Again, a love for the space provided, but only to browse, to soak in the ambiance. Actual purchases are guilt driven, the result of feeling bad about 'abusing' their hospitality.

That's a thin ledge to balance your business on.

I'm also confused that someone who'd embrace the big box model as "their idea" of a bookstore would be resistant to Amazon. The lure and selling point of the 'big box' over the "quaint little dusty shop" is selection, and no physical space can ever compete with Amazon on that front.

There are great bookstores in the world- whenever I'm able to visit City Lights in San Fransisco dozens of titles leap off the shelf at me, demanding to be read. I can go into a Borders or a B&N and not see a single interesting book unless I go digging in the stacks. That's the difference between a store with an editorial eye toward its stock and one that's basically a grocery store, fronting what they're paid to front, stocking the top 50 or whatever backlist sellers in a catagory plus whatever new stuff the publishers care to push.

For fans of selection Amazon should be like a boundless all-you-can-eat buffet. Big, generic spaces like Borders or B&N make odd triggers for bouts of romance of the bookstore...that's like a gourmand mourning the impending demise of Applebee's, going all misty eyed over the death of their stacked, stuffed and topped(tm) menu.

But this sort of muddle is hardly atypical.
I talk to people all the time who claim to love books, claim to love bookstores, oh my god this place is so great, I could spend all day in here...OOOH look, I really need to get that for my Kindle!

People like to think of themselves elbow deep in a bookstore. But bookstores aren't theme park attractions- we sell books, not tickets. We don't make anything directly off being cool places to be seen, or hang out, or browse. Each dollar fed into a Kindle or iPad or whatever comes straight off the collective bottom line of every physical shop not named B&N.

I'd appreciate it if more journalists and experts (and customers, come to think of it) grasped this fact.