Borders Bookstores to Liquidate

[JointStrikeFighter]

With a bit of jiggery you can read all the lecture powerpoints on kindle too.

[Simon_Jester]

I would have fucking killed for an eBook reader during uni.

Can you imagine what it would be like? You have an eBook reader for class, ALL of your set texts and readings are made available via the library. No more spending absurd prices for text books you'll only use one semester.

Lovely idea. Who publishes the textbooks, and why?

simon_jester:

Have you ever spilled a drink on a book?

Had a baby or a cat decide to rip it up?

Or hell just accidentally rip it? Physical objects have wear and tear. Digital objects are forever.

No, once when I was four, no, and not badly enough to have real consequences, respectively. Meanwhile, I've managed to accidentally drop e-book readers onto stone/concrete/asphalt floors three times, damaging them, and I find myself having to worry about my e-book reader being stolen in a way I'd never have to worry about a book being stolen. This is probably due to my own clumsiness and paranoia, but there it is.

Meanwhile, digital objects are theoretically forever, the possibility exists, but the quality of our ability to read and make use of 25-year-old computer content does not encourage me on this account.

"We're sorry, but we no longer support this format because it doesn't allow us to insert free-air standing holography into the book to go with the hologram projectors that let us charge an extra (inflation-adjusted) hundred bucks for the reader. Also because we're upgrading to 256-bit readers next year, and we can't be arsed to write emulation software."

Nothing like that would ever happen, of course. I'm being silly. I hope.

At the same time, the ability to carry an entire library around with me doesn't feel all that useful because I usually have a maximum of two or three books that I'm in the process of reading cover to cover anyway, and I only carry one of them around with me, usually a paperback that weighs well under a kilogram. The weight and bulk are not a problem, at least not for me.

Now, I'm not saying "e-books will never catch on" on account of these things. That would be ridiculous. What I want to ask, though, gentlemen, is:

Does thinking this way make me a "fetishist," as some imply? Does the fact that I honestly feel that for conveniently accessible paper content, the disadvantages of storing and carrying paper content aren't all that serious, mean that I am somehow an illogical person with a creepy obsession for paper books? Does liking being able to go to physical locations and shop for things make me an illogical person with a creepy obsession for... something?

And is something wrong with the fact that I regret the predictable, eventual decline of that network of stores with their conveniently accessible paper content, in favor of an online order and online e-book distribution network?

Can't you buy from Amazon.com and have something delivered to your door, thus rendering the local distributor kinda obsolete?

Yep. You can. There are drawbacks- you don't meet people, you're more likely to have Amazon stick only the books it expects you to want under your nose. And psychologically it's much, much easier to just go to Amazon and grab the book you expected to want than it is to go looking for something new to want.

This is, I think, one of the unresolved issues of the Internet age: the fragmentation of culture into small groups of like-minded enthusiasts: the system is smart enough to market to you that which it expects you to want, and as a result you see a lot more of that, and fewer opportunities to see something genuinely new.

[Faqa]

Does thinking this way make me a "fetishist," as some imply? Does the fact that I honestly feel that for conveniently accessible paper content, the disadvantages of storing and carrying paper content aren't all that serious, mean that I am somehow an illogical person with a creepy obsession for paper books? Does liking being able to go to physical locations and shop for things make me an illogical person with a creepy obsession for... something?

Given that this is at the very least me, I would like to apologize if the use of the term offended you.

My meaning is an attachment to paper books because they are paper, not for rational reasons. I know plenty of people like this, and I've heard lots of talk about "the smell of ink, the feel of paper".... yeah. I figure the term fits. I feel that a lot of the arguments against e-books boil down to an irrational attachment to paper, which I refer to as a fetish. This isn't creepy or bad, it's just present.

As for your other, rational objections to ebooks:

- An ebook is indeed more of a financial loss if stolen. However, if your paper book was stolen, you lose the content, and have to re-buy it. Ebooks? Properly backed up, you can download the content right back to your computer. I suppose it depends on what you prefer to lose.

Consider that e-reader prices are dropping all the time, and this point may be less relevant.

And a final question on this point - do you own an MP3 player? It has roughly the same advantages and disadvantages of an ereader vs cd's, say.

- Backwards compatibility - there is no guarantee on this, true. But text is text. You can counter this by buying in 'open' formats such as epub that are not under the control of a single corporation. It's also worth pointing out that if a format has been largely superseded by other formats, there's usually a reason for it.

- As to your reading habits - what about larger books? History, etc? To me, it is an ENORMOUS advantage to not have to carry those around with me.

- What is conveniently accessible about paper? The fact that you've been doing it your entire life? That's habit, not convenience. You can flip through an electronic copy (at least on Amazon), you can see similar books at the touch of a mouse. If you wish to seek out content outside what exactly you were looking for, you can do so. Far more than you'd be exposed to, as a matter of fact, at your local bookstore.

The problem you stated about the internet in general - yes, it's a real problem. Or at least an interesting phenomenon. It's the ultimate in capitalism - people get exactly what they want. They have triumphed over an indignity of nature - being stuck with people or products that are not ideal. Unfortunately this particular indignity is, in a way, good for us. Being forced to deal with people who don't think like us builds our ability to work with people in general. Being able to opt out of this into echo chambers (guilty) is.... less than building of this.

Socializing at bookstores however, is not this. It's actually SPECIFICALLY socializing with people of a certain bent, who like bookstores. Rest assured, there's a forum for that

[Simon_Jester]

Given that this is at the very least me, I would like to apologize if the use of the term offended you.

My meaning is an attachment to paper books because they are paper, not for rational reasons. I know plenty of people like this, and I've heard lots of talk about "the smell of ink, the feel of paper".... yeah. I figure the term fits. I feel that a lot of the arguments against e-books boil down to an irrational attachment to paper, which I refer to as a fetish. This isn't creepy or bad, it's just present.

Well, I feel that I honestly prefer books for logical reasons- it gives me something to do with my brain that isn't online, that's a big one, because I have enough trouble with that as it is.

The main argument against paper books that I see as an issue for recreational use is weight and bulk. I'm not much bothered by having to carry objects with mass.

As for your other, rational objections to ebooks:

- An ebook is indeed more of a financial loss if stolen. However, if your paper book was stolen, you lose the content, and have to re-buy it. Ebooks? Properly backed up, you can download the content right back to your computer. I suppose it depends on what you prefer to lose.

Consider that e-reader prices are dropping all the time, and this point may be less relevant.

The readers will only become cheap if they become low-function- my cell phone is cheap and easily replaced, but that's because it's not a smartphone.*

Market pressures encourage people to keep adding more bells and whistles to their readers in exchange for making them more expensive- because bells and whistles sell. While I'm content to use an ancient and few-functioned e-book reader that costs very little... I'm also content to use a paper book. I'm not a representative sample of the market, and what's likely to be on offer for sale doesn't necessarily match my wishes.

And a final question on this point - do you own an MP3 player? It has roughly the same advantages and disadvantages of an ereader vs cd's, say.

I don't own an MP3 player; I only really listen to music in the car, and the car's radio is satisfactory for my purposes. Sometimes I want to hear a specific song at home; I usually go looking for it on YouTube.

- Backwards compatibility - there is no guarantee on this, true. But text is text. You can counter this by buying in 'open' formats such as epub that are not under the control of a single corporation. It's also worth pointing out that if a format has been largely superseded by other formats, there's usually a reason for it.

I like still being able to read books that were published sixty years ago, thankyouverymuch. If a format gets superseded there may be a reason, but I don't want the world's libraries to be subject to planned obsolescence on a timescale of twenty to thirty years.

- As to your reading habits - what about larger books? History, etc? To me, it is an ENORMOUS advantage to not have to carry those around with me.

Eh. I don't actually mind carrying around two or three pounds of stuff. Very few books I read on a regular basis weigh more than I mind carrying. My big reference books, my complete works of William Shakespeare and so on, yeah, those are heavy... but I don't carry those around with me to read, and never feel cheated by that fact.

- What is conveniently accessible about paper? The fact that you've been doing it your entire life? That's habit, not convenience. You can flip through an electronic copy (at least on Amazon), you can see similar books at the touch of a mouse. If you wish to seek out content outside what exactly you were looking for, you can do so. Far more than you'd be exposed to, as a matter of fact, at your local bookstore.

Conveniently accessible means convenient access to paper- means I can go to a dedicated facility that is not far out of my way to obtain it, that I do not have to spend unusual sums of money to obtain the paper book, and so on.

If paper publishing becomes a niche market and the prices double (in inflation-adjusted terms), and if I now have to custom order each paper book rather than being able to swing by a nearby store and buy half a dozen of them in one go, then access to paper books has become less convenient.

This does not mean paper is more conveniently accessible than electronics. That's not the point. What it means is that the paper itself has become 'locked away' such that it is more difficult (or expensive) to get.

The problem you stated about the internet in general - yes, it's a real problem. Or at least an interesting phenomenon. It's the ultimate in capitalism - people get exactly what they want. They have triumphed over an indignity of nature - being stuck with people or products that are not ideal. Unfortunately this particular indignity is, in a way, good for us. Being forced to deal with people who don't think like us builds our ability to work with people in general. Being able to opt out of this into echo chambers (guilty) is.... less than building of this.

I know the trend. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned to it.

Socializing at bookstores however, is not this. It's actually SPECIFICALLY socializing with people of a certain bent, who like bookstores. Rest assured, there's a forum for that

[/quote]I'd rather meet people in person, really. It's better for me and I know it, even if I don't always do it.
_________

*Yes, I still use a stupidphone. You will no doubt ask me what else do I still use- a slide rule?

The answer is yes. Yes, I do.

[Shroom Man 777]

It's really hilarious that fat nerds call people who like reading out of books made out paper "fetishists". Uh, the vast majority of people in the world who aren't privileged to read their shit with a kindle or whatever like books just fine. For a bunch of guise who claim to be tolerant of all sorts of things, the amount of discontention over people like to read paper books (omg!!!!) is hilarious. Why don't you go bitch at people who like to paint miniature models of spess mareens and tell them that there's a new pogrom called MSPaint that allows them to do all that shit in the computor, maaan. Omg obsolete long lines at hobby shops and buying paints at stores! Omg loser leiks musics on vinyl discuses and buys em at garage sales, get an ipood dood!

Some people like to read books that way, who knew am i rite lol? Don't like it? Deal with it.



[PS - it's not like these guys poo-pooed ebooks or anything, they're also just fine with it and are cool with it and think its all radical and convenient and slick, mangs. It's just that they also wanna read from dead trees too cause they think it's groovy, daddy-o.]

[Starglider]

I know plenty of people like this, and I've heard lots of talk about "the smell of ink, the feel of paper".... yeah

I look forward to gen-Y people in about twenty years gushing about how they 'love the feel of the glass, and the grain of the pixels' in their retro tablets, instead of this new-fangled laser in-eye augmented reality nonsense.

Another major attraction of e-readers is plastered all over Amazon's advertisting, but I didn't see it mentioned here; thanks to ubiqitous wireless, you can 'think of a book and start reading it within thirty seconds', wherever you are.

Eh. I don't actually mind carrying around two or three pounds of stuff... Conveniently accessible means convenient access to paper- means I can go to a dedicated facility that is not far out of my way to obtain it, that I do not have to spend unusual sums of money to obtain the paper book, and so on.

These expectations are quickly becoming viewed as a silly pointless burden by a majority of people. Colleagues poke fun at me merely for maintaining a limited personal library of mp3s that I like, rather than subscribing to Spotify and constantly streaming anything they feel like. Fortunately I have a smartphone watch so I usually come out ahead on early adopter points.

As Stark pointed out, most of this whining is way overblown, print-on-demand will continue to get cheaper and is far more useful to a paper collector than physical bookstores. There's a significant environmental argument for digital text as well; the environmental impact of the paper production, the shipping for online ordering, the power for the air-conditioned bookstores, the fuel you burn going to bookstores etc.

[Faqa]

The readers will only become cheap if they become low-function- my cell phone is cheap and easily replaced, but that's because it's not a smartphone

That's a matter of progress, and you know it. Smartphones are still a 'bell and whistle' in and of themselves.

I do believe there WILL come a point where cell phones as small mobile computers WILL be a commodity good. Not the iPhone30 from Apple, but the idea that the average person carries around a mobile computing device, not just a phone. E-readers, being more specialized will follow this far more easily. Amazon is pushing this pretty hard - $139 for entry-level.

Consider that all the points I've made are about e-readers in GENERAL - which is to say, even the low-level model is FAR better than paper.

For the record, I also use a stupidphone - although I recognize the possibilities of what I could do with a smart one.

I like still being able to read books that were published sixty years ago, thankyouverymuch. If a format gets superseded there may be a reason, but I don't want the world's libraries to be subject to planned obsolescence on a timescale of twenty to thirty years.

Perhaps I haven't explained myself - an open format such as 'epub' can be implemented by anyone in the world. This means that it will ALWAYS be possible to take the standard and build a reader for it, even 300 years from now. THAT'S the big advantage.

Beyond that, there are projects like Project Gutenberg that specialize in precisely digitizing books in plaintext to make sure they do NOT disappear. And this is MUCH easier to do for electronic books, frankly, than for paper books.

I know the trend. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned to it.

The trend is meeting a universal human wish. How do you propose to get people to work against their common desires?

It's really hilarious that fat nerds call people who like reading out of books made out paper "fetishists". Uh, the vast majority of people in the world who aren't privileged to read their shit with a kindle or whatever like books just fine. For a bunch of guise who claim to be tolerant of all sorts of things, the amount of discontention over people like to read paper books (omg!!!!) is hilarious. Why don't you go bitch at people who like to paint miniature models of spess mareens and tell them that there's a new pogrom called MSPaint that allows them to do all that shit in the computor, maaan. Omg obsolete long lines at hobby shops and buying paints at stores! Omg loser leiks musics on vinyl discuses and buys em at garage sales, get an ipood dood!

OMG, THE THIRD WORLD IS LESS PRIVILEGED THAN I AM!!!! SHAME!!!!

*goes to hide in a corner*

Kindly explain to me how people who don't have the option of an e-reader are even remotely relevant to this discussion?

The thread's about ebooks. I talked about their future, and replied to Simon_Jester when he raised points. It's a discussion forum. For discussing shit. I can see where you might have missed this point.

I have no idea about painting models of space marines, but I'm pretty sure preferring vinyl would count as a fetish, at least in how the term has been used here. Unless it has audiophile qualities I'm missing.

Another major attraction of e-readers is plastered all over Amazon's advertisting, but I didn't see it mentioned here; thanks to ubiqitous wireless, you can 'think of a book and start reading it within thirty seconds', wherever you are.

I look forward to hackers exploiting the SHIT out of that in future.

[Stofsk]

I would have fucking killed for an eBook reader during uni.

Can you imagine what it would be like? You have an eBook reader for class, ALL of your set texts and readings are made available via the library. No more spending absurd prices for text books you'll only use one semester.

Lovely idea. Who publishes the textbooks, and why?

Doesn't matter. My library will almost certainly have a number of reserved copies of whatever textbook is currently being studied in a semester in their reserve section, the problem is there's limited copies so you can only borrow them for a very limited time (sometimes you can't even really borrow them at all, they have to be returned to the shelf after you're done reading what you need from them or have made photocopies). But if they had electronic copies for use in ereaders, then I can only see students benefiting from them.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I'd be curious to hear about how management fucked up over there. What I've heard about Borders (including the "over-expansion" bit) was from a former Borders manager on another forum plus the news. The guy also mentioned a number of other things, like how over-use of coupons helped drive up traffic but severely hurt their profit margins in 2009-2010.

Well, I started working at Borders before the Borders Rewards (BR) card, and it was a very different company. There were signs on the front door that proudly proclaimed Borders as one of the top places to work for GLBT or disabled workers. There were cartoons and articles posted in the breakroom about Borders, specifically the atmosphere Borders was trying to generate. Back then, Borders did not try to compete on price so much as with selection, atmosphere and customer service.

We had more jazz and classical music, more niche books than B&N and tons of rare movies, which brought in a lot of regulars. It was quite common for our customers to tell us that we stocked stuff that Tower and Virgin didn't. We had more backstock for genre authors and a much wider selection in nonfiction, too. I mention this because it became important when management changed.

Customer Service was our number one priority. Up-selling happened, but it was a natural result of our enthusiasm for our products and a customer feeling satisfied, not some kind of hard sell. It was not uncommon for us to call the B&N across the street for a customer if we didn't have something they wanted. A lot of customers came into our store just to talk with us and get our recommendations. We also had a lot of events and live music a couple of times a week, which gave the store more of a community feel than other chains provided. Again, a change in management would change all that.

A year or two into my time there, there was a change in CEOs. In fact, there were quite a few changes near the end, but what made this one more noticeable is that the new guy decided to change up a lot of company-wide policies. At first, the changes were small, such as some new inventory processes or a change in store merch layouts. I understand that this is the time period when Borders took on a lot of debt to expand and at the same time started feeding its customers to Amazon with the absolutely idiotic decision to use amazon as Borders' internet affiliate. That debt set the tone in a lot of ways as it became a heavier and heavier burden to bear.

Before the BR card, Borders sent out email coupons once or twice a month (because we were different from B&N, you see). Employees were expected to get new sign ups for 2 to 5 percent of all of our transactions. Then the number kept rising, to 10%, which was not really very realistic. The problem is that we were close to the saturation point with the coupons, but management didn't feel it went far enough to gain customer loyalty. Besides, there was a new trend in Borders of doing everything that Barnes and Noble had done years ago and pretending it was an original idea. That's when we brought out the BR card.

BR was great at first. Employees liked it. Customers liked it. It was free and easy to explain. However, members started receiving coupons at least once a week. Regulars who came in every week now waited for the coupons, and the semi-regulars did the same thing. They all accrued a ton of Borders Bucks, which turned into a huge loss for the company that Christmas. So the next year, Borders took its popular card and changed it. And then changed it again. The result was a wave of anger and confusion from the customers most loyal to us. Many of them became trained not to buy anything for full price, and a lot of them cut back on spending (such as in the romance section) accordingly. Then Borders cut the senior discount, KTLA and Friends of the Library discounts and a lot of other regular discounts for large groups of buyers in favor of more BR shenanigans.

Anyway, around the same time as the BR card came out, Seattle's Best Coffee (SBC) was bought out by Starbucks, which lead to all kinds of customer crankiness. The only place worse than the cafe for an unhappy customer is the restroom. We would get customers who showed up at info or the book reg to complain about coffee or cookies. Cafe supervisors could no longer help out on the floor (at least not at our store) and had their duties changed or schedules messed with. Borders had entered into a disadvantageous contract with SBC and as the number of hours allotted to the store dwindled, the cafe became a sort of vacuum that bled the floor dry of manpower without really increasing revenue.

Gradually, the new CEO had stopped advancing employees from inside the company and started hiring cast-offs from Blockbuster and Circuit City for District Managers and various corporate positions. When Ron Marshall took over, he placed almost all of the old guard with grocery store people who thought of books as interchangeable items that should be sold by hard sellers regardless of content.

Borders decided to try something else that had worked for B&N: publishing. The first book Borders published was Slip and Fall, written by some screenwriter for the Sopranos. I only know a couple of employees who could bring themselves to read it, but from what I heard it wasn't very good. At the same time as the book came out the last episode of the Sopranos aired, which was pure poison for Slip and Fall. Of course, this was the first time Borders demanded its employees give the hard sell. If we recommended a book to a customer, it should be this book. Naturally, a lot of our regulars were put off by this. They had trusted our opinions, but now they saw we were just shilling the same corporate bullshit. When the book didn't sell, corporate decided that it was the sellers' fault and not, say, that the book sucked.

Under the Ron Marshall, the "make book" program became ridiculous until customers could no longer take us seriously. By this point, Borders was so in debt to publishers that they decided what books we had to push, and they always chose shitty books that they couldn't sell otherwise. We had to sell books about women dying of cancer or bleak comedies set in 1944 Stalingrad to EVERYONE. Marshall had sent out secret shoppers and given managers secret checklists. If an employee didn't push the books on any single customer, he could be written up. Needless to say, this destroyed our credibility. It didn't help that half the make books had graphic rape scenes in them and we were expected to promote these books to anyone from middle schoolers on up. Morale went in the toilet. It didn't help that Marshall actually came out and called the employees worthless hippies who couldn't carry their own weight because many of us refused to participate. The higher ups started sending humiliating, threatening emails every week and harassing GMs over the phone. Here is one such email that was typical of the era but has become rather famous for its hilariously poor grammar: Now is Julio.

To be continued...

[weemadando]

I would have fucking killed for an eBook reader during uni.

Can you imagine what it would be like? You have an eBook reader for class, ALL of your set texts and readings are made available via the library. No more spending absurd prices for text books you'll only use one semester.

Lovely idea. Who publishes the textbooks, and why?

Many of my BA courses had the faculty compiled readers which have to sell for $20-$40 a pop due to printing costs for such a small run. It's just a collection of excerpts from larger works or compilations of primary sources for the historical stuff.

Making that available as an eBook for free or at minimal price? BETTER OPTION.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Anyway, Borders decided to deal with its debt by killing everything that made Borders unique from B&N. Our selection was very quick to go. We lost about 2/3 of our music and video stock and about half of our books, all from the set of items that we carried that no one else did. We lost a HUGE amount of customers over this. People who came in for rare music, foreign movies or to browse their favorite genres stopped coming in. Worse still, most of the books we carried were cheaper at Costco, let alone Amazon, so there was no reason to buy from us anymore. The section that was the most profitable, the bargain section, was treated by disdain by corporate because the only sales that mattered were Trade Paperbacks (QPs) or Hardcovers (CLs). This also lead to a change in how staff were to approach customers. I often made a lot of MM (mass market) up-sells in genre fiction because it was fairly easy to do. Suddenly, the only up-sells that mattered were QPs or CLs, which usually meant very expensive books or books that aimed for specific audiences and were difficult to up-sell. (This was before the make book program really hamstrung us.)

Deciding they didn't trust us, Corporate started assigning scripts to every transaction. Suddenly sellers became parrots. Every register transaction took 5 minutes because we had a literal paragraph of sentences we had to say to every single customer*. Long lines became a common complaint, but since hours were cut all over, we had no more help to ring up faster. We started getting some really insulting training videos that amounted to "here is how you say this script and not sound like a complete robot."

Then Borders went and shot itself in the head with the new Borders.com. No longer affiliated with Amazon, the new Borders.com differentiated itself by being the single worst commercial website I have ever used. It was embarrassing. To make matters worse, Corporate removed all of our old titl-look-up software and replaced it with Borders Search (a piece of shit) and eventually with just the website itself, which made the computers on the floor practically worthless. Instead of helping a customer in a few seconds, it now took 5 minutes for each page to load in a search, with less functionality and a poorer search algorithm than the old software. I saw veteran managers curse on the floor dealing with this system and I heard them tell customers just to use Amazon and never use our site because of the glitches. (At one point it was not secure for credit card use. In store, we would just ring up a gift card for the exact amount and then use the gift card to pay for the online order. This wasted a lot of theoretically productive man hours.)

I'll come back with more later if anyone cares to read it. Corporate did some nasty things to inventory as well which fucked us over royally a few Christmases ago...

*My personal favorite story about the reg scripts is this: I was just finishing an argument with my GM about how we should retain some flexibility with our shpiel when a customer came up. My manager stood right behind me to make sure I read the script. The customer placed down two erotic magazines, one about "bears" (not the quadrupeds) and one titled "The Sarge and His Privates". As I scanned the magazines, I leaned over the counter and said to the customer, "Have you thought about your Mom today? Borders Gift Cards make the best Mother's Day gifts."

That made my point.

[Cecelia5578]

I know plenty of people like this, and I've heard lots of talk about "the smell of ink, the feel of paper".... yeah

I look forward to gen-Y people in about twenty years gushing about how they 'love the feel of the glass, and the grain of the pixels' in their retro tablets, instead of this new-fangled laser in-eye augmented reality nonsense.

Another major attraction of e-readers is plastered all over Amazon's advertisting, but I didn't see it mentioned here; thanks to ubiqitous wireless, you can 'think of a book and start reading it within thirty seconds', wherever you are.

Eh. I don't actually mind carrying around two or three pounds of stuff... Conveniently accessible means convenient access to paper- means I can go to a dedicated facility that is not far out of my way to obtain it, that I do not have to spend unusual sums of money to obtain the paper book, and so on.

These expectations are quickly becoming viewed as a silly pointless burden by a majority of people. Colleagues poke fun at me merely for maintaining a limited personal library of mp3s that I like, rather than subscribing to Spotify and constantly streaming anything they feel like. Fortunately I have a smartphone watch so I usually come out ahead on early adopter points.

As Stark pointed out, most of this whining is way overblown, print-on-demand will continue to get cheaper and is far more useful to a paper collector than physical bookstores. There's a significant environmental argument for digital text as well; the environmental impact of the paper production, the shipping for online ordering, the power for the air-conditioned bookstores, the fuel you burn going to bookstores etc.

Yes, and I'm sure you and your social circle probably make enough money so that you can enjoy having disposable income to spend on gadgets to show how geekier you are than everyone else.

The vast majority of people aren't (I'm assuming in this case) IT professionals who make an upper middle class salary.

[Stofsk]

I'll come back with more later if anyone cares to read it. Corporate did some nasty things to inventory as well which fucked us over royally a few Christmases ago...

You should know by now people care about your stories.

[Guardsman Bass]

That's pretty fucked up. I'd heard about mismanagement being a major issue with Borders, but I had no idea it had gotten that bad.

Besides, there was a new trend in Borders of doing everything that Barnes and Noble had done years ago and pretending it was an original idea.

I wonder if that's common for situations where there are two large brands competing in the same market. I worked at both Home Depot and Lowe's Home Improvement, and they copied everything from each other.

I'll come back with more later if anyone cares to read it. Corporate did some nasty things to inventory as well which fucked us over royally a few Christmases ago...

Please do it.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Some day I'm going to publish all the craziest, wackiest shit that happened at Borders.

I'll have an entire book just dedicated to bathroom shenanigans (some of which occurred outside the bathroom).

[Starglider]

Yes, and I'm sure you and your social circle probably make enough money so that you can enjoy having disposable income to spend on gadgets to show how geekier you are than everyone else.

As multiple people have repeatedly explained, the cost of this technology has been steadily declining and will continue to do so. Cell phones went from extremely exclusive in the 80s to massive growth in a succession of countries until now where only the poorest countries aren't saturated with them. Early adopters (often starting with militaries and large corporations) play a major role in financing the early phases of product evolution and allowing new technologies to ramp up enough for economies of scale to allow mass market viability.

Historically, this is exactly what made books widely available, as printing presses improved and profilerated.

[Skgoa]

The funny thing about this thread - other than people arguing because they simply have different tastes and can't accept that others might feel differently - is that I love books, but still find myself wanting to argue on the "pro eBook" side. Turns out its not a binary decission after all. If anyone cares: every time I go anywere for longer than a day or so, I take books with me. Amd since I like to have choices, this means I routinely carry around several kilos of dead tree. So yeah, I almost bought an iPad just for this use case...

...

At my faculty, almost all lecture notes, slides, relevant papers (sometimes even entire books) etc. are available on the respective lecture's website. For scientific books most publishers offer free .pdf downloads from inside the university's network. One very well known example is http://www.springerlink.com/ - it has gone so far that nowadays the first advice is "have you checked if Springerlink has anything on that topic?" instead of telling someone to go to the library. But indeed, most publishers seem to at least offer additional material. Also, our library is in some kind of programm that lets us read practically any scientific journal or technical magazine for free. OK, there are no pictures and the website itself sucks, but there are thousands of periodical publications available and for all those I checked even their entire back catalog. And if that wasn't enough, the library is scaning books, too. They mostly do old books that they wouldn't dare give out of their hands, but any student can get any book scaned, for a fee. Once scaned, the book is available to anyone else free of charge.

[folti78]

The readers will only become cheap if they become low-function- my cell phone is cheap and easily replaced, but that's because it's not a smartphone.*

I case you haven't noticed, mobile phone development branched out into multiple directions in the last 20 years, where smartphones are only one part of the market(although the more sexiest/hyped up one segment), while the classic stupidphones' still going strong in the market segment for people who don't care about the whistles/lose their phones often/can't afford a bigger. Heck in the last few years, the price of phones barely capable more than talking/texting/alarmclock fell below $50 even if you buy them from an independent vendor(read: full price, no vendor lock on phone, no 12-24 months loyalty to vendor). They also branched to special old/impaired phones with extra large keyboards and displays and panic buttons with preprogrammed list to call in emergencies.

heck some of this differentiating already started in the e-book reader market, with multiple offerings from around $150 to the sky is the limit high.

[Simon_Jester]

I'll address the rest of the responses to me later, I'm in a bit of a hurry right now.

Yes, and I'm sure you and your social circle probably make enough money so that you can enjoy having disposable income to spend on gadgets to show how geekier you are than everyone else.

The vast majority of people aren't (I'm assuming in this case) IT professionals who make an upper middle class salary.

A slide rule serves admirably to establish that you are a capital-G Geek too. It also makes old people respect you, which can be tricky to do otherwise in your twenties.

[Falkenhayn]

Rock on Bob. Rock on.

Is it fair to call Christmas, '07 the point where Borders hit the iceberg?

[weemadando]

Yes, and I'm sure you and your social circle probably make enough money so that you can enjoy having disposable income to spend on gadgets to show how geekier you are than everyone else.

The vast majority of people aren't (I'm assuming in this case) IT professionals who make an upper middle class salary.

Guess what? An eBook might set me back 150AUD for a top end one now.

That is between one and three textbooks. Which is about a quarter of one semesters cost in books.

I will say that you damn kids today don't know how good you've got it.

[Cecelia5578]

Yes, and I'm sure you and your social circle probably make enough money so that you can enjoy having disposable income to spend on gadgets to show how geekier you are than everyone else.

The vast majority of people aren't (I'm assuming in this case) IT professionals who make an upper middle class salary.

Guess what? An eBook might set me back 150AUD for a top end one now.

That is between one and three textbooks. Which is about a quarter of one semesters cost in books.

I will say that you damn kids today don't know how good you've got it.

LOL I'm probably older than you, still in college, and actually have an interview tomorrow for an IT job that will require a (fun) public trans commute, so I'm actually debating about buying a Kindle or an iPad 2 myself.

[Terralthra]

Yes, and I'm sure you and your social circle probably make enough money so that you can enjoy having disposable income to spend on gadgets to show how geekier you are than everyone else.

The vast majority of people aren't (I'm assuming in this case) IT professionals who make an upper middle class salary.

Guess what? An eBook might set me back 150AUD for a top end one now.

That is between one and three textbooks. Which is about a quarter of one semesters cost in books.

I will say that you damn kids today don't know how good you've got it.

Uhh...even once you've got the reader, the textbooks aren't free.

[weemadando]

Some might be, but even the one's that.aren't should still be significantly cheaper as you don't need to actually print/bind/store/ship/retail them anymore.

I reckon you'd have your money back in a semester.

[Block]

Some might be, but even the one's that.aren't should still be significantly cheaper as you don't need to actually print/bind/store/ship/retail them anymore.

I reckon you'd have your money back in a semester.

I highly doubt that. Textbooks are a huge business and I really doubt the publishing companies are going to be willing to lose that revenue stream.