In case you’ve had your head in a book for the past week – all irony duly intended – you would have heard or read about the latest chapter in the Borders Books saga.
Since the announcement late last week, readers and literature pundits have been mourning the upcoming foreclosure of over 200 of the company’s stores world-wide.
The details are fairly black and white when broken down statistically. The company has accrued $1.29 billion in debt with assets of $1.28 billion, and as per convention, mismanagement was to blame (five CEO’s in five years). I would imagine the fifth CEO was a little skeptical when signing that employment contract. “So what happened to the last four?”.”Dude, it’s not important, just sign the fucking form already”.
If any one of these CEO’s could wind back the clock and seek counsel from one of their many fallen music industry counterparts, I’m sure they would. The wheels have been coming off for several years now – much the same as they did with the music industry – and even though hindsight is a wonderful thing, to me this is the most striking part of a situation, that in many ways has ostensibly been labeled a tragedy in the literature world. “The death of a bookstore” rings through the air with a Willy Lohman feel to it.
At the moment, it appears Australia is likely to be affected somewhat, with warnings of closures and the loss of jobs. We are a book loving culture at heart. It’s drummed into us at young age. At school our syllabus is strong with an eclectic range of authors and styles. We’re familiarised with Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Golding, to name a few. So will this have any ensuing effect on how our children are educated with literature? It seems unlikely, but a knock-on effect can manifest itself from situations such as this.
But how and where did it all go wrong for the little shop that could?
Borders present business model – and its model for many years now – is a distant relation to the one ingrained into the original blueprints. Brothers Tom and Louis Borders launched their first shop in 1971: two scantily-stocked rooms in Ann Arbor, Michigan. From there the empire began to rise, slowly but steadily, until an acquisition by Kmart in 1992 ensured that any mum ‘n pop heritage would be filtered out and Borders would be regulated according to the mission statement. The acquisition was deemed unsuccessful as Kmart faced its own financial dilemmas [t-shirts that don’t fit properly, footballs made out plastic, questionable no-name candy], eventually spinning off the company and creating what is now ‘Borders Group’. And this is where it stands today.
There are several viable theories surrounding the demise of Borders. The most obvious being the company’s ineptness to efficiently utilise the internet as a primary sales tool. Around the time of the Kmart acquisition Amazon became an irresistible means for buying cheap secondhand books online. It took Borders three years to play catch up and launch its own variant to Amazon. The site performed poorly and generated just $5mil in its first year. Eventually Borders acquiesced to Amazon. A failed business relationship between the two followed, before Borders decided to launch its own in-house e-commerce division. And yeah, that obviously failed too.
So, today we find ourselves not rejoicing over the future of readily available literature through recent technological advancements, but instead we find ourselves saddened by the fall of a public company – a one-time subsidiary of Kmart closing its doors – most likely once viewed by Kmart as an under-performing little brother that needed to be cut from the family. We pay no heed to the real fallen heroes of retail, but rather express sentiments lamenting the death of reading.
In 1999 Shaun Fanning unleashed Napster into the world – it ultimately changed the way we consume music for good. Was this a bad thing? For some, yes, but for many it was revolutionary and allowed us the freedom to explore the differing realms of consumerism without being confined to a publisher’s contracted stock. Amateur musicians benefited greatly from this and used the new medium to share their art with people all over the world. Could the same happen with authors? Are we moving towards a Myspace for writers? When the average person is asked to name their favourite authors, they’re generally limited to one hand – ask them to name their favourite musicians and you’ll be canceling your one o’clock.
Many will argue that this could never happen, as the feel of a paperback is priceless and unparalleled. My Dad once said this about the vinyl record: “Son, there will never be anything like vinyl, you can hear the emotion in every pocket of air”. He was right, but like millions of others, he walks around today with an ipod in his pocket, listening to digitally re-enhanced versions of his favourites. It’s a convenience thing, that’s all.
We evolve with technology and big business so rapidly that often we’re blind-sighted by our habitual tendencies and conveniences. Has the time come to embrace the new format of reading?
