When Borders announced liquidation last week, there was a brief glimmer of hope that thirty of the stores might still be saved under a deal with Books-A-Million. That hope is now gone, with BAM's CEO telling newspapers that his company couldn't reach a satisfactory deal with Borders in time (some of the stores had already started going-out-of-business sales). However, BAM may independently lease some of the store locations Borders leaves behind, like the former Borders store at Huntington Mall in Barboursville, West Virginia. Via Shelf Awareness (Photo: markhillary) ...

If Borders couldn’t make it, can any bookstore survive? To bookstore owners and patrons watching Borders go down the drain, this has to be a fairly pressing worry. To try to quell the panic, the American Booksellers Association has issued a statement calling the closure “an unfortunate right-sizing of a bookstore landscape that has suffered from overexpansion in certain markets” and insisting that the future for other bricks-and-mortar booksellers is still bright. In that light, Jason Boog at Galleycat has collected a list of suggestions for independent bookstores on how try to stay relevant to consumers in an e-book...

While some of the more cursory summaries in the press are framing Borders as a victim of the ebook revolution, anyone who's followed the story knows that the company was being publicly embarrassed by its financial woes not five months after the first Kindle was released--hardly enough time for Amazon to strike an ebook death blow. Edward Nawotka in Publishing Perspectives traces the problems back all the way to 2001, when a lethal dose of grocery store DNA was injected into Borders' upper management tier--who then handed the company's online sales over to Amazon. Add to that some labor problems...

The New York Times reports that Borders has called off tomorrow's auction and will move forward with submitting the liquidation plan it has worked out with Hilco and the Gordon Brothers Group. If the federal judge approves the plan on Thursday as expected, the company will start closing stores this Friday, and continue liquidation through September. Borders has 399 stores still open, and employees 10,700 people. The Times also points out that Borders' death may have ripple effects in the publishing industry: Publishers said with Borders gone, they would plan for smaller print runs and shipments. Employees at major publishing houses worried...

As Amazon purchases the UK-based on-line bookstore The Book Depository, UK publishers are up in arms over the move. Already none too happy with Amazon—just look at how quick they were to jump on the agency pricing bandwagon for e-books, only a few years after ditching a century-long similar price control on printed books—both large and independent publishers are now calling for an investigation into the practice of on-line bookselling in general. The Bookseller reports that the Publishers Association and the Independent Publishers Guild are collaborating on a submission to the Office of Fair Trade, in response to its...

Jahm Najafi, whose private equity firm Najafi Companies had made a bid for Borders earlier this month, has withdrawn his offer, reports the Wall Street Journal. With Najafi out of the picture, time has almost run out for the bookseller; it has until Sunday to find a new bidder, and failing that it will go up for auction next Tuesday, where a group of liquidators who are willing to pay more than Najafi are expected to be the opening bidders. The problem with Najafi's offer was that it was too low to appease landlords and creditors, who were afraid that he...

I'm writing this today from the coffee shop at a Borders, one of the superstore locations in the middle of the U.S. to survive the company's recent bankruptcy and ensuing real estate culling. I was the first person in the store this morning, and in the past half hour nobody else has come in, which seems too bad: here are thousands upon thousands of books, comics, and magazines, and nobody to browse them. John C. Malone, who wants to buy 70% of Barnes & Noble, told the New York Times earlier this week why he thinks bookstores still matter (emphasis mine): "We...

About a week ago, JB Dickey, proprietor of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, posted on his blog about an email exchange he’d had with an author being published with Amazon’s new mystery-publishing imprint, Thomas & Mercer, who wanted to come in and do a signing. Dickey declined, explaining that he did not want to support Amazon, “the enemy of independent bookshops,” in any way. Although the author replied explaining that Amazon’s signings were promoting independent bookshops, getting more people to show up at them and shop there, Dickey explained that he had both moral and practical objections to helping to...

The WSJ is reporting that Borders has announced an initial bidder for its bankruptcy court auction: Direct Brands, a music/DVD/book distributor owned by private-equity firm Najafi Companies, that operates the Book of the Month Club. Direct Brands bid $215.1 million for the beleaguered book chain, and in addition will assume about $220 million in liabilities. The newspaper article is behind a paywall, but MobyLives has reprinted this quote from it concerning further store closings: ...the retailer would operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Direct Brands, the companies said. Direct Brands didn’t indicate how many Borders stores it would keep open or...

I just posted about how Amazon, via self-publishing and agent-based publishing, poses a threat to publishers who still haven’t updated their business model to compete. Here’s a post from self-publishing booster J.A. Konrath’s blog that points out one of the reasons why Amazon is such a threat. Responding to one bookstore calling for a boycott of Stirred, the book he’s publishing under Amazon’s new Thomas & Mercer imprint (and which will consequently be placed as printed editions in bookstores as well as published electronically), Konrath points out that he has done a lot for bookstores over the years, and...

You can find small-press books and e-books in some of the strangest places. Yesterday, I took a ride with my parents and some of their friends on the Arkansas Missouri Railroad, a small rail operation that operates cargo and passenger excursion runs between Springdale and Van Buren, Arkansas. Twice a year, it makes a special run out of Seligman, Missouri, traveling four hours and about a hundred miles down to Van Buren, Arkansas and the same length back, allowing passengers to spend three hours at a Van Buren arts and crafts street fair in between. I found a couple of used book...

On The Bookseller blog, John Blake offers what he apparently believes is a novel solution to “saving” bookstores from the encroaching press of e-books: delay selling the e-book until later. He writes: The idea of simultaneously publishing an exciting new title both as a hardback and as an e-book seems totally crazy. If only publishers could publish the book as a hardback initially, then put out the e-book some months later, bookshops would be given a sporting chance to stay in business, and the dizzying decline of book sales could almost certainly be slowed. ...