The news that Borders filed for bankruptcy has elicited no flood of crocodile tears from these middle-aged eyes. To be sure, Borders isn’t actually disappearing from the landscape; just some Borders stores are closing. And here in San Francisco, the highest-profile closure would have been a good idea under any circumstances, given that the store in question (Post Street) is about six blocks away from another downtown store (San Francisco Centre). There were too many Borders stores in the Union Square district anyway.
Let’s face it: Amazon and the Kindle (or Barnes & Noble with their Nook) have delivered a right cross to Borders’ jaw. There used to be a time when you would head to Borders to pick up the latest sleazy novel or futile self-help book or celebrity tell-all, while you went to the real bookstores to go browsing and literature-surfing.
Nowadays I use the Kindle app on my iPad as a constant reading companion. If I want to indulge in the latest whatever, I can have it in a few seconds flat, and for considerably less money, via Amazon. The Kindle store is also ideal for mainstream literature at bargain-basement prices, or for free.
Borders, with its white-light sterility, with its casually rude clerks and indifferent minimum-wage sales staff, with its mall-in-wherever atmosphere and dehumanizing customer-as-lemming attitude, comes out a distant last in the book-selling sweepstakes. The independents have the people who care about books. (Sometimes they have the lock on attitude-y little shits as well, but that comes with the territory.) Barnes & Noble does the sterile big-chain thing quite a bit better, and still manages to retain some fleeting book-people cachet. Amazon wipes the floor with all of them where selection and price is concerned, and when you throw in the Kindle’s breathtaking convenience, that’s pretty much the end of it for Borders.
I required no great flash of insight to recognize that I stopped patronizing Borders almost altogether once the Kindle came along. Anything I can’t get on Kindle (and there’s still a lot of stuff unavailable in e-book format) can be acquired overnight via Amazon’s regular shipping. And if I want to go book-trawling, I’ve got Green Apple and the sweet Aardvark store over on Church, plus Moe’s in Berkeley. No Kindle store will ever replace those.
I often became irritated in Borders. Rarely did I ever enjoy being there. The San Francisco Centre store is claustrophobic and, like all Borders stores, overly bright to the point of feeling like an autopsy room. The Stonestown store is bigger and airier, but it has a distinct zoo atmosphere. So I would buy what I needed and got out as soon as I could. This is in sharp contrast to the little Books, Inc in my own neighborhood, which can be a fun store to browse around in — and I make it a point to buy stuff there, just to do my part in helping the store stay open.
When I think of Borders’ current problems, I think of the surly checkout clerk at the Stonestown store who snapped out her demands like a drill sargeant terrorizing grunts in boot camp. To me she represented everything that was soulless and repellent about this most soulless and repellent of corporate chain stores. Books treated like so many bags of potato chips or glittering phalanxes of identical 7-Up bottles, people treated like cattle to be herded. Buying books at Borders was duty, not pleasure; afflictive, not healing; depressing, not inspiring.
I felt no particular pangs when Tower Records and Virgin Megastore closed their doors; those big record stores suffered from precisely the same mech-farm mentality as does Borders.
So if the current round of closings is the beginning of the end for Borders (I suspect there will be several more rounds of closures until the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle vanishes altogether), then so be it. I’m a voracious reader and hardcore book lover, but I can do just fine without Borders, as I have done just fine without those surly little Gen Y twits at Tower Records, or the hellish urban blare of Virgin Megastore.
Communism fell. The Arab world is making a game attempt to drag itself out of the Middle Ages. And dinosaurs like Borders can go right on merrily passing into extinction.