Livres Sans Frontieres

Or, books without Borders.

Borders Books and Music, a bookstore chain that once seemed like it would grace the American landscape for a long time, announced it was going out of business this September, with liquidation sales having started this past Friday. The chain, which was once derided for resisting employee unionization and driving many independent book retailers out of business, has apparently met its own match. Attempts to find a buyer or an investor for the chain have fallen through. Now all that remains is for its 399 remaining stores to sell all that remains before it gets remaindered.

I have a soft spot for Borders, despite the fact that it was an evil chain. (I'm kidding, of course.) The Borders near my house had a lot of poetry readings, and it also had a wide selection of travel and history books. I won a copy of the first volume of The Beatles Anthology from the record department in a trivia contest, and I even bought five of Family's seven albums on CD there, at a time when I couldn't find Family titles anywhere else. The store - in Wayne, New Jersey - actually closed in January 2008, and the wing of the mall that it occupied was later demolished. I haven't been to Borders in years, mostly because all the stores within reasonable driving distance have long since closed.

Borders was outdone largely by intense competition by Amazon.com, but also by similar competition from Barnes and Noble as well as by new electronic book devices like Amazon's Kindle - an innovation Barnes and Noble wisely invested in with its NOOK service, as the appeal of e-books is growing. Not with me, though - I prefer real books you can turn the pages of and that don't have to run on batteries. But Barnes and Noble, unlike Borders, was savvy enough to do what it had to do to survive.

Because there are folks like me who prefer real books, some independent stores lucky enough to outlast Borders will probably survive - even in this economy. It will be harder for authors to get discovered with such a large chain having disappeared, though - and the remaining bookstores out there will likely be unable or unwilling to make up the loss. But brick-and-mortar book stores of some type will continue; folks keep predicting their demise, but they always poke through like weeds in a sidewalk.