One of the anniversaries of the many deaths of Borders

I should be reading a manuscript but it's late and I'm tired and it's not the right conditions for work reading.

So instead, let's reflect on one year of life after Borders. Technically I could do in September, but this week marks the real end, the week when the liquidation became official, when the theory of the Borders bookstore gave way to the going out of business sale.

And it still sucks.

To tackle some good news first, the end of Borders wasn't the end of publishing as we know it. I don't know of any publishing company that went under because they were left holding a bag with a hole in the bottom of it. At least not yet. I'm also not aware of any publisher with cash flow issues where our receivables get kind of long in the tooth that's had its circumstances improve over the past year.

But that's about the extent of the good news, that the Borders bankruptcy wasn't the start of some fancy game of dominoes where we could watch them all merrily go falling one after the other after the other.

So I should be happy, right. The business I'm in took one of the biggest hits it's faced in my quarter century in publishing and it's muddling along without disaster in its wake.

But...

The same store sales figures at B&N have increased by a very small amount, considering the number of customers and book sales that were up for grab after the demise of Borders. There hasn't been any rush of bookstores to fill the vacuums or the bookselling deserts left behind in Borders' wake. Some of this is because a lot of the sales could move to e-books, which are much more opaque to track still than print book sales, so it could be that the sales haven't gone so much as gone behind a curtain. But I still don't think of this as good news. One of my biggest worries is that the outlets for selling print books will disappear faster than the appetite for print books.

I can't go to bookstores any more. I used to spend a huge chunk of my life visiting bookstores, and I loved doing it. I felt a little empty when Borders was around that life and business had gotten busier to where I wasn't able to spend as much time visiting bookstores as I'd liked. But it turns out that was because I could visit Borders. Even in its diminished struggling state, even after all the management missteps and the remodels and everything else Borders did to make their stores less enticing places to shop, Borders had better bookstores. A better curated selection. When I could go to a Barnes & Noble and play compare & contrast I could tolerate going to Barnes & Noble. When the only bookstore option I had was to go to a Barnes & Noble, I couldn't bare to do it. Especially because B&N hasn't even been B&N any more. Once upon a time it used to be that Borders were the more interesting and sometimes better and sometimes worse stores while B&N was the boring consistent chain that you could count on to have a core selection from store to store. Now, the difference between the good and the bad B&N is as extravagantly bad as it used to be at Borders, with bad stores having half the JABberwocky title count of good ones and not having core selections like the complete Lost Fleet series or the complete Nightside series. By and large, I just get depressed.

I still drag myself into a B&N every once in a while, maybe tomorrow I'll drag myself in to the one on 46th and 5th since I have to meet a friend a couple blocks away. But there isn't any joy to me in visiting bookstores. It's all just work now.

And there aren't choices. Most indies have crappy sf/fantasy sections and don't give me much joy. The only place where people can go and buy a book in an old fashioned bookstore is a depressing boring chain that doesn't even offer the benefits of consistency the way it once did.

I still think of Borders when I think of the world. When the Silver Line on the Washington Metro starts running in very late 2013, that will be the line that was going to allow me get to the Borders in Tysons Corner more often. If they ever build a streetcar line down Columbia Pike in suburban DC, that will be the streetcar line that would have made visits to the Borders in Baileys Crossroads much easier. When I head to Chicago for WorldCon, this will be the WorldCon that won't finally give me a chance to get down to the Borders on Beverly in the far South of Chicago. I don't see dead people, I see the ghostly apparitions of the Borders that were.

Based on the timing of the first round of liquidation sales, I knew that the most likely last week for Borders would be the week I was in St. Louis for Bouchercon, and that this would make it very difficult to be the last person, turning off the lights, in a Borders somewhere. This proved to be correct. The only Borders accessible by transit from St. Louis was already closed, the signs already taken down by the landlord. The idea of taking a car service out to the suburbs was a theoretical one, the actual closing time for a store on the last day of business was a moving target. One thing to take the car if you knew you could get there at 8pm and hang around until 9, another when nobody could really say if the store would close at 2pm or 5pm or 8pm.

This still depresses me.

Part of me says it's just as well. It would have been horribly depressing going to a Borders and seeing the closed off sections of the store, the last dregs of the liquidation sale, the people scrounging around the dregs for some final bargain at 90% off. It would have been awful and sad.

But when a loved one dies, by and large you still feel that urge to be at the bedside to give your loved one a proper send-off.

And like a loved one that died after a long illness, the best memories I have of Borders don't date back to the days closest to its death. They date back to the mid and late 1990s, the earliest years of this century. The Borders that was still good enough that I could spend a day in 2002 traipsing by BART and bus and foot to the Borders in San Ramon and the Borders in Pleasanton and the Borders in Fremont and the Borders in Emeryville and feel like that was a really really wonderful way to spend a day and see the world one Borders at a time. By 2011, if I did a day like that it was because that was the kind of thing I did, because it connected me to that day in 2002.

But yes, on balance, I wish I had been at the bedside when the lights went out.

As it was, though I hoped maybe it wouldn't be, I kind of knew that my last visit to a Borders the week before the very very end had all of the depressing aspects of being at the bedside without actually being there. It was a struggle to find in the depleted selection that book that might be the last book I actually purchased for pleasure at a Borders. The one good thing was that it was the closest bookstore to my hometown, at the successor mall to the one that once had a Book & Record store, and later a B. Dalton.

But it sucks, it totally totally sucks.

It's a year now since we knew there'd be no Borders, since it became apparent that the white knight to try and save some semblance of the chain wasn't going to materialize.

And it sucks.

There are two other posts that I could do some day. One is the optimistic one, where I can talk about how recent months are showing how e-books and the internet really can help people find an author in a better and nicer way than the old-fashioned bookstore and the old-fashioned review outlets. Take that, NY Times Book Review! Who needs to worry about all the newspaper book review sections that don't exist any more when we have iO9.

Then there's the depressing post, about the total market failure of indie bookstores that don't care, publishers that don't help them, and which I'm supposed to love because why? and love the publishers because why?

Maybe some day.

Barnes & Borders

Publishers Lunch Daily has a list of Barnes & Noble locations that have quietly closed at the end of 2011.

The demise of their big and busy store in the University Village mall just down the hill from the University of Washington and its University Bookstore had been known to me earlier. But also of interest is that their store in Washington DC's Georgetown neighborhood has also shuttered.

Going back fifteen years ago in the earliest days of B&N's nationwide superstore expansion, they would take out ads in places like The New Republic to ballyhoo their wonderful selection, including of academic, scholarly U Press type books. Those two stores, University Village and Georgetown, were two of the half dozen or so locations that would be specifically included in those posts. So to see those two stores closing at pretty much the same time kind of brings down the curtain on a small part of the book superstore era.

The University Village store is one that I'll certainly miss as a literary agent for sf/fantasy. Not so much the one in Georgetown, which sold very little in the genre though it was overall still considered a kind of flagship store for the company and had a depth of inventory that went beyond what was justified by its sales. That store gave me "Evanston moments."

Because it was visiting Evanston, IL, I'd guess when I was over for WorldCon in 2000, that I first came across a Borders with a really really godawful surprisingly bad sf/fantasy section, which theretofore I'd never known such a thing existed, and then popped across the street to the B&N which had a much better selection, but you could tell by looking at the yellowed books and how they would have the 5th printing of a Deathstalker novel that was several months into a 6th printing that they weren't actually selling sf/fantasy but at least deserved credit for having the selection.

That was a strength of B&N for many years, to have a more consistent core title selection across their entire range of stores, and that was the Georgetown store, to go in and be grateful they were carrying a lot of JABberwocky titles but to be deeply depressed by the deeply yellowed tops of the books.

But to get to the actual two points of the post...

1. B&N is getting very Borders like in their selection now. They're no longer bothering with a core stock across the full range of their stores. It used to be, and I felt this lack of brand identity was a very big problem for Borders that did not serve them well, that I could go to the Borders in Commack and find half the selection of the Stony Brook store a few miles away, while the B&N gap was more like 2/3 or 3/4 of the title count in a bad store vs. a good one. Now, the Tribeca B&N carries fewer than half the titles in Union Square. The B&N in Bayside Queens carries only two of the six "Lost Fleet" paperbacks, and these are up there with the Nightside books as the top-selling JABberwocky titles after Charlaine Harris, Brandon Sanderson and Peter Brett.

Now, B&N doesn't have to worry about physical competition the way Borders had to worry about competition from B&N. But there is competition from Amazon. There's a school of thought that says it doesn't make any sense for B&N to compete with the long tail of Amazon because there's no way to do it so why even try, as a B&N you're selling something other than whether the store carries two Lost Fleet paperbacks or six. I'm not there. Cost of inventory in mass market is not a huge factor in the success or failure of your business, I still think if you're a B&N and you want to give people an excuse to get in their car and visit your store that you can't nickle and dime. B&N knew this once, and it saddens me that they no longer do. That said, times have changed, and maybe it doesn't matter the way it did six or eight years ago that your stores had full runs of the key series while the other guys did not.

2. I used to visit DC for a four day weekend in no small part because I loved to take the temperature of a very big bookselling market. I could easily visit 6 B&N, 8 Borders, a handful of Waldenbooks, a few Daltons, a handful of Olsson's, some Books a Million. I could easily visit a very very impressive 30-35 bookstores over a long weekend. Now there's nothing left to visit. The mall stores slowly disappeared. Then Olsson's went bankrupt. Then Borders started to close the underperformers before now closing entirely. And the Books a Million in Old Town Alexandria is gone as well.

So let's see, now on a DC visit I can go around and visit the Dalton/now B&N in Union Station, B&N on E St., Clarendon, Rockville, Springfield, Potomac Yard and Bethesda. KramerBooks and Books a Million in Dupont Circle. Politics & Prose. Whatever's before security at National Airport. So that trip's gone from 32 bookstores to 10. And really, not even that. Traipsing out to Rockville or Springfield made sense when I could visit both a Borders and B&N, not just to visit another B&N. Potomac Yard is a pain to get to without a car, I'm not up for that any more. Politics & Prose is a pain to get to and doesn't really have much of an sf/f section so what's the point. I used to think about dragging in some of these just to make the list of stores visited look very very impressive for claiming the trips as business. Now, I can go to DC and actually justify visiting all of seven bookstores that might offer a reasonable return on the schlepping.

Am I right to find this depressing?

Because that's one way to look at it, with each new bookstore that closes more and more of us can now choose to drive several more miles than before to visit a boring B&N that maybe doesn't even bother to carry the entire Lost Fleet series in mass market. [Another of the B&N that's said to have closed is their Westside Pavilion store just south of Westwood in LA; with the Borders having closed a year prior to the bankruptcy, this introduces yet another urban book-buying desert, with the closest stores now requiring a schlep several miles west to Santa Monica or east to the Grove.]

Intellectually, I know that we can also all now sit in our easy chairs and buy pretty much whatever book we want in a minute or two on our iPads or our Nooks, our Kindles or our phones.

But you know, even that kind of depresses me in a way.

the mournful dirge

Wrote this email to someone I know who worked at a Florida Borders...


Sorry didn't return your call, at a weekend long wedding with two days in office and to catch up on sleep before heading to St. Louis for Bouchercon where I am now.

Very sad. My last Borders visit last Sunday to Middletown NY between the wedding and the town I grew up in. I really wanted to be the last customer St a Borders as I was at 1003, but no way for it to happen,  Four of the StL stores already closed, two were going to close on Thursday but one shut a day early and the other as I kind of expected said "we may close in 15 minutes, we may close in 45," and i couldn't hire a car to take me ten miles into Illinois, wait around for who knows how long and in the process blow off the stuff I and to do at the convention.

Even though there was nothing to be done about it, I will feel like a loved one passed away without me getting to the bedside.

Then I go to the downtown Left Bank Books, it has one non-Charlaine JABberwocky book on shelves, typically indie it isn't Way of Kings or Warded Man or some other book someone may want to read but an obscure book that will be selling 7 copies a week on Bookscan if that once the liquidations are over.  There is no other trade bookstore for some four miles, the closest with any selection, i.e., a big BN, is further away than that.  Walked by Subterranean Books, the other major StL indie last night after it had closed, looked in and realized it wouldn't be worth another special trip to that neighborhood to actually walk into the store because it would be depressingly similar to the Left Bank experience downtown.

And speaking of Barnes & Noble, I can barely bring myself to walk in to one any longer. I go in, the first thing I see are the Nook covers. The boring BN corporateness, their strangely curated selection where they have long had the poorer selection of books/authors of mine not being carried by both chains, their ugly octagons with books buried on a shelf eight inches up from the floor, all of these things I could happily endure when I knew there was something better somewhere and that the BN I was just passing through.

But I will have a job, you leave the Dolphin with an uncertain destination, and I hope there will be some better next step ahead.  For you, for the other people gutting it out to the end for the hourly paycheck, while the bankruptcy court OKs $125K bonuses for Mike and the gang.   

My stock certificate is being framed, I overpaid for the store directory from base of escalator at #582, and purchased for $15 a "borders is 150k books, magazines, CDs, videos" framed poster with a big B on it from #592.  Once upon a time it was what the poster said, in another day or two it will be a memory.  If you find your way to NYC someday, we will have a cold something or other and reflect in front of my shrine.

Will give a ring when I am back home, and in the meantime you know my thoughts and wishes are with you.

oh, the entire sf/ f section at the downtown Left Bank is 96-ish titles n

Ten Years Later

The Borders at the World Trade Center opened in 1995. I'm told it might not have been very profitable on account of the size of the rent, but it was the company's first store in Manhattan, an important presence for a publicly traded company just a few blocks from Wall Street, and Borders made money in those days. There are worse things than if your face to the world is a store with huge throngs of shoppers selling tons and tons of books.

Lower Manhattan wasn't in the beaten path for me, but because Borders World Trade was such a bustling and prosperous store that sold so many copies of so many books by so many JABberwocky clients it was a store that I liked to visit at least every several weeks. Even if it meant making a special trip, it was a pleasant destination. And on a beautiful day, what better really than take the occasional walk through Greenpoint and Williamsburg, over the Williamsburg Bridge, down East Broadway through Chinatown, down Park Row beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and past City Hall, and around 1:40 after leaving my apartment I was there.

Tuesday September 11, 2001 was a beautiful late summer day. The sky as blue and near to cloudless as you might like, the temperature perfect, and I hadn't been to Borders World Trade in several weeks, can't remember if it was early August or late July, but it had been a while. So the plan for the day was pretty simple, to try and escape from the office a little bit early if I could (and in those days, I could almost always escape from the office a little bit early and not worry anyone would miss me), be out the door by 4PM or 5PM and I'd have that nice walk with the setting sun looming behind the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan as I headed over the Williamsburg Bridge, and have a long overdue visit to the Borders.

Those plans changed.

There was an e-mail from Elizabeth Moon, mentioning this plane that had flown into the World Trade Center.

Like most people, my first thought was that some guy in a Cessna had lost his bearings and had an accident.

I sat in front of the TV for a while. Wondering what was going to happen. It wasn't a Cessna. It was a pretty big fire. It was 1000 feet in the air, and is there any way to fight that besides letting it burn itself out?

And then however many minutes it was after I turned on the television, there was that puff of smoke and then it cleared, and there weren't twin towers any more. And then there weren't any towers at all.

And then I went back to work, kind of.

Denial, distraction, avoidance, whatever the mental state was that was there, I couldn't do much but try and bull my way through whatever happened.

I went out to cast my vote in the mayoral primary NYC was having that day. I shouldn't have bothered, the primary was called off not long thereafter.

I went to the UPS depot with a box of books to send. I shouldn't have bothered. UPS had summoned its trucks back, they were rushing into the yard, they were pulling the gates shut.

I went to the Post Office. The Post Office was open. But a little bit down at the end of the block, you could see the sidewalk on Queens Boulevard full of people who'd walked over the Queensboro Bridge and were now walking however many miles they needed to walk in order to get home. Forest Hills was another five miles away, Kew Garden was six. It was one of those eerie sights you think you might see only in the movies.

I had lunch. I did have the TV on in the kitchen but I didn't sit perched in front of the TV for the rest of the day. One of the things I've learned is that there isn't much to gain watching the telly in times like this. Comes from hours of watching after Challenger, waiting for that NASA press conference that kept getting pushed back and pushed back, and you realize for all the time you're spending watching you're watching for hours and hours and there isn't any actual news.

I called Elizabeth Moon, and we discussed some revisions to her novel The Speed of Dark.

That night, it was hard to sleep. The next day, it was hard to concentrate on anything, to do any work at all. The mind was someplace else.

My synagogue had a memorial service that night. I walked into Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge. You could look south toward Ground Zero, and how could you not, really. The winds were blowing most of the stuff from Ground Zero some other direction, but there was a smell in the air all over the city. Burnt metal, burnt flesh, burnt something. I don't know what it was, I don't like to think of what it was, I don't want to be reminded of it. But it was everywhere. It felt weird walking into Manhattan, but it felt weird not to, like whatever it was that happened yesterday it was necessary to still be doing something like what I often did. And Manhattan was, of course, eerie. Quiet, empty. I stopped by the Whole Foods in Manhattan (back then, there was still just the one in Chelsea) after the service, it was open and it felt good to buy something there even though they had signs up that they'd be closing early, that they might not have some things because they hadn't gotten any deliveries that day, but it was open and it was good.

The #7 train was running. And of course it was a weird ride back, especially as we headed out of Grand Central and under the East River. Everyone was looking at one another. What were you doing on the subway on this evening?

Those of you who know me know I have a puckish sense of humor. It was gone for the next three weeks. Nothing really seemed funny. There was this pit in stomach instead. Every time I was in Manhattan. Coming back on the LIRR from my annual September bookstore rounds of Long Island, sitting on the train heading back into NYC and kind of not wanting to do it.

Looking at some of the pictures from 9/11, New York Magazine has some in their current issue, I realize just how well I've managed to suppress some of the imagery of the day. Not my memories of the day, I don't talk about them or think about them very much, but I can always summon those images quickly, always there right below the surface, never far away and always a part of me. But the images of the twisted steel, the haunted faces, the people racing up Broadway, the jumpers, all of those things that were part of the day, but not of my part in it.

I can still give a guided tour of the Borders that was there. Head off the E train, past the newsstand, turn right in the World Trade Center concourse (some of the tiling of the section between the subway and the concourse survived), I think it's closed off now while they rebuild the PATH station, but will be back) and there was the small lower level entrance a little bit down, up the escalator to the main level by the main entrance doors at Church and Vecsey. Main cash wrap at the north end of the main level. The mystery, romance and horror lined up on the shelves there. A few steps up to the entrance into 5 World Trade Center, this was where you had your displays of new books. In the southwest corner of this main level was where you had your sf/fantasy, the new hardcovers and trade paperbacks wrapped around a column, three sections of low shelving for the mass markets, full of backstock all the time. Shel, one of the booksellers, had some old sf/f covers that he hung up in the section, they'd be part of that smell I could smell. He ended up at the White Plains store. The magazines were also on the ground floor, near the escalator up, which led into the cafe. After one of those walks to the store to meet up with a friend, it's that cafe where my friend and his wife were sitting, and I could kind of tell by that morning sickness look on her face before he said anything that they were expecting. The music was off to one side, this store had a smaller music section than most stores of that vintage. And then a long, narrow upper level with the non-fiction categories spread each side of an aisle that led back to a relatively small children's department at the far end. The store is gone ten years now, but I can still take you there.

So I didn't visit the Borders at the World Trade Center on September 11.

In fact, it was another six months before I went to Lower Manhattan at all. Shortly before I left for London Book Fair in March of 2002, I kind of forced myself to go down to Lower Manhattan, for every reason and for no reason at all. To walk by Ground Zero. To look west down Fulton Street, to this wonderful view of the World Financial Center that was never supposed to exist. To stand near the corner of Church and Vecsey.

As once upon a time, they were.

Running on empty

There's a custom in Jewish prayer to recite something called the "Mourner's Kaddish" at the end of every worship service. When I'm leading a service, there's an introductory reading I do to this. It's the last paragraph of John Crowley's Little, Big; my favorite non-client fantasy and in part because it leads up to this wonderful passage of loss, of feeling for better days and different times. And there aren't better words to provide as I begin what will perhaps be my final post about the Borders business, for today all of us who love books have to be in mourning:

From LITTLE BIG by John Crowley

One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house, made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer; but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

And let me make very clear, you can love Borders or hate it, you can rue the day they came in to your neighborhood in 1994 and helped to kill some local independent store, you can say you liked Barnes & Noble better, or that the staff at your local Borders were rude, or they never seemed very nice when you wanted to arrange a signing. You can do all of that. But if you love books, if you care about the power of the written word, of the ability for a writer to tell stories, and for those stories to move people and give meaning to the lives of others, if you care about any of that you can't be happy today. This is the saddest day for the book business that any of us have ever seen, and let us only hope that we can still say the same 25 years from today.

There are millions of people who now don't have a good, convenient, physical place to buy and explore books, unless you think a computer screen counts. And I mean that. I don't agree with everyone Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith say about agents, I don't remotely like they'll have an extra hour to drive to visit a good bookstore. There are millions of people living in Manhattan, many millions more working there on a weekday, and we're about to revert back to before Sept. 5 1995 when Borders opened at the World Trade Center -- only worse because before then there were at least a handful of indies on the island with decent and wide selections co-existing with B&N, and now you can't look at the sf section of Posman Books in Grand Central and think this is a place you want to go for your book shopping needs. So for all the rest of us, our book selection is now only and solely what Barnes & Noble decrees it to be. And I've got news for you, if you think publishers have been spending the past several months doing detailed analysis of their Borders sales and finding the 1% or 2% of their titles that were selling well at Borders alone and are now going to give those the extra TLC to get B&N to share the love -- well, the idea's good for a laugh. There are authors who no longer have a store to sell some or all of their books.

And yet I can't be as sad as I feel I should be.

I tried awfully hard when I visited the Peabody MA store in February. It was that brief window between the bankruptcy filing and the start of the liquidation sales for the first round of 200 closures, the sun that day was still shining even as the dark clouds gathered and the storm approached. It was a Borders store that time forgot, still with the old-fashioned woody shelving with the sf/f hardbacks and trades separate from the mass markets. I knew at one level that I could have shopped those same shelves twelve or fifteen years before. But I couldn't really get "up" for that experience.

That's the thing, once upon a time it had been fun to enter a Borders, good or bad not to know what you'd find selection wise on the shelves, to roam some weird diagonal aisles, to look at the different things that store had up at the front that other stores wouldn't, to peek into the mass market overstock shelves and find some singleton copy of a book that I could rescue and put out where customers could see and buy it and have some real sense of accomplishment, or climb the ladder if nobody was looking to rescue something from the overstock there.

But the stores didn't have personality any more. If they did, it was the personality of a ghost town, of walking in to the Plano TX stores or Preston Road stores in April 2010 and feeling the cobwebs rolling along down the aisles of these large empty boxes without merchandise enough or customers enough to sustain.

And on the other side of the ledger, there's supposed to be some comfort in finally reaching the end of a death that was long in coming. None of that here. Around 11,000 people that will be out of work. The authors who don't have an outlet for their books. The readers who don't have a bookstore to explore. There's pain, there's sadness, there's misery, all around. There's no sense of relief.

But for a few minutes, let me find a tear or two for the pensieve, and let me try and find those good memories of times gone by:

First walking into the original Ann Arbor Borders some twenty years ago, looking at more books than I'd ever looked at before in amazing and wide and stunningly broad profusion, that first purchase of Ben Bova's Exiles Trilogy. And then the hours spent exploring those shelves during my college years.

That happy moment when I "broke the code" and realized what the numbers on the buff inventory punchcards meant and knew I could now browse the shelves with entire new layers of meaning.

All those visits to DC, visiting Borders by Ride-On and Metro and by foot, doing all those things I mentioned above that I'd love to do at Borders, in an area where almost all the bookstores really were above average. The hustle and bustle of 18th and L during lunch hour, of White Flint on a Saturday night, of watching Germantown sprout from the corn fields to become a hugely important location for my clients.

Walking in the first time to the store in Columbia, MD or Gresham, OR or Milpitas, Mission Viejo, Torrance CA or State St. or Fairview Heights IL or South Bay and Mission Viejo or Fairfax and Bailey's Crossroads, VA, Redmond WA, and realizing you'd just walked in to one of the best bookstores around, the places that were getting in 24 copies of some new paperback that you'd have sworn there wasn't a store getting more than 12 of them, and that would sell through all two dozen in no time flat.

The first visit to the first Borders that was actually close to where I was living as an adult on Park Ave., finding a bookstore for the first time that had 100ish books I'd sold on its shelves.

The birthdays I'd spend taking the train out to Long Island. Really. There were many many years I'd quite happily spend doing the great Long Island bookstore tour.

Professionally, going to Newark DE or to Bailey's Crossroads VA to see clients signing at those big special stores for dozens and later hundreds of people.

The thing is, in a way I wish Borders had died unexpectedly, that these happy memories were fresh in my mind and not dependent on tears in the pensieve, but it's all so interconnected, so related, so entirely unaccidental that these stores will soon be no more.

The bulbs will burn out, or be turned off by Hilco and Gordon Brothers, on some Sunday in mid September.

The end was expected.

The stories, now only stories.

The borders open, and many crossing. That time is not now.

As once upon a time, they were.

Doomed to Repeat It

So as Borders makes its way through the bankruptcy process, they've gotten the OK to terminate their relationship with Starbucks to have Seattle's Best Cafes. The filings to get out from under say how the royalty rates are too high and make it difficult for Borders to make money on the cafe operations, so it would be better for Borders to take back the operation.

Hmmm. If you substituted the Borders website and Amazon for cafes and Seattle's Best, you'd be getting a strong sense of deja vu.

Borders went with Seattle's Best because they had, over time, a very big problem that they just weren't running their cafes very well. B&N had that relationship selling Starbucks coffee and desserts from Cheesecake Factory from cafes with attractive menus and bright fixtures with everyone in their very nice and consistent uniforms. Borders kind of slowly scraped over time toward having some vague degree of consistency in their wares, but overall the cafes just never looked as nice. Borders would sell Kim & Scott's pretzels at all of their stores but they wouldn't be branded as Kim & Scott's pretzels. Since Borders couldn't run the cafes well, farming out the business to Seattle's Best and having some degree of consistency and a recognizable brand and all that sort of thing seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Just like, since Borders was late to the internet and a distant third and not running things very well, farming Borders.com off to Amazon was kind of a good idea at the time.

In both cases, however, the better solution would have been to run things better within Borders.

But even after the Seattle's Best conversions and the money spent fixing up the cafes, the cafes were better but still not as good. There was still less variety than at a B&N cafe, still not as attractively presented, and some stores were never converted, and even those that were it dragged on over several years. And of course those conversions were one part of the endless rounds of store remodels, and ultimately even this seeming good thing in the remodel process was maybe not so good after all.

Smooth move.

There may also be another few dozen Borders locations closing, as many as 20 superstores and 30 mall and/or airport stores.

And these, Borders would actually like to keep open.

The problem here is that these are stores that are very profitable and well trafficked in very good locations or stores that have really really good leases. Under the calendar that's in effect for the bankruptcy, Borders had x months to decide if it wants to keep or reject store leases, clock will be up in September. While there are some buyers circling around a substantial portion of the business, there's no way a sale can close in time for the new buyer to take over the leases before that September deadline.

And Borders is still a little tight on cash until a buyer is found. In a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, a company has to find a lendor who will float cash for the company to operate during the reorganization. This is called "debtor in possession" or DIP, and the company that's giving the DIP money is first in line to get paid back ahead of everyone else. For Borders, the DIP financing was on the low side because of the challenging circumstances facing the company, and this is exacerbated because Borders lost a lot of money in March and April, maybe somewhat less in May, but they've burned through a lot of their DIP money.

And because these are good stores, like the Penn Plaza location in Manhattan or downtown Boston, in good rentable locations, the landlords aren't rushing to compromise with Borders and extend the deadline for rejecting leases. All the other locations, there's a signed piece of paper that in most instances is pushing the September 2011 deadline into the opening weeks of 2012. Not these.

So there are these 50 stores with millions of dollars in inventory in them, that Borders might have to vacate in September, like it or not, on account of the interaction of these various factors. If you are going to vacate the stores by September, you need to start liquidating the inventory by the end of June, to allow July and August for the going out of business sales and a couple of weeks in September to clear out. And in order to do that, you need the court to approve the sales and the liquidators to put in their bids for the honor of running the sales right about now.

With its back to the wall, Borders is struggling to get the DIP lendors to give them more time, or to find some way of getting the extension papers signed by the landlords, but with no certainty of getting anywhere with either, they have to put in their filings and motions to approve the sales. They think maybe it will end up being closer to 15 stores than 50 that end up having to shutter, but who knows.

The manager of the Borders store in downtown Boston has said it's 100% certain his store will close. The closest major bookstore would then be the Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center, around two miles away. That's practically like having it another city. If you're wondering if there's any effect on the ability of people to buy books as a result of losing these stores, I can't think of any better example.

evolution in action

So I think it's safe to say that the main beneficiary of the ongoing disappearing act at Borders has been Amazon or other internet outlets for buying books (and probably not borders.com as one of those!).

Nielsen Bookscan gives breakdowns on sales in retail/brick and mortar channels as against sales in discount & other which includes primarily Amazon and bn.com. (Target and K-Mart are also in that line but for the typical new release sf/f hardcover these outlets aren't a factor.)

So we can look at the breakdown on launch week for those two lines and see where books are being sold. This also separates out e-book sales. Whatever people are doing there, wherever they're buying e-books, we are able from this to look solely at market share for new books in print format.

January 2010, launch week for Simon Green's Good, Bad & The Uncanny
Retail market share 54%

March 2010, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Oath of Fealty:
Retail market share 44%

April 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead & Gone paperback
Retail market share 43%

May 2010, launch week for Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Familly
Retail market share 39%
[and this is a book that would have been competing with mass merchandisers like Target and K-Mart as well]

January 2011, launch week for Simon Green's Hard Day's Knight
Retail market share 54%

these are all books that came out before the Borders implosion, a January 2011 release like Simon's would have been the last one for

March 2011, launch week for Elizabeth Moon's Kings of the North
Retail market share 32%

April 2011, launch week for Jack Campbell's Dreadnaught
Retail market share 32%

April 2011, launch week for Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family paperback
Retail market share 40%

OK, if you want to you can poke holes left and right in the argument I'm making. The only direct year-over-year 450-Borders-operating-normally vs. 200-Borders-in-bankruptcy comparison I'm making is with Elizabeth Moon, and one comparison is a point, not even a line and hardly a definitive trend. It's an anecdote. I don't know exactly how many of the copies that sold a year ago sold at the 250 Borders that disappeared over the year following.

But I've been in the business for 25 years, and I consider the year-over-year drop in retail market share for Elizabeth Moon to be jaw-dropping. It's not like people couldn't buy cheaper hardcovers on Amazon a year ago. It's not like the economy's in dramatically different shape now than a year ago, it's pretty shitty in both instances. And somehow or other, brick-and-mortar booksellers are losing huge market share to internet, and I'd suspect that it's the biggest such drop in percentage terms since Amazon arrived in business fifteen years ago, almost has to be since if you lose 10% of your market share every year for fifteen years you don't have any business left to lose. And the one big difference between brick-and-mortar and Amazon now vs. last year is those 250 Borders that went up and vanished, and it just seems to me to be abundantly clear that most of those shoppers haven't decided to drive an extra mile to find a B&N.

Let's just say I'll keep an eye on this!

And if you're looking at this and wondering if/how Borders can come up with a plan to reorganize, I don't think you'd feel encouraged.

selective reading

The Wall St. Journal had an article this week about the slow return of guns to the shelves at Wal-Mart. (no link, since hides behind their pay wall.)

Ordinarily an article like this would meet with my scorn and approbation. I am not a gun person.

But there was a sentence in the article that I enjoyed very much reading. It said that Wal-Mart -- and for all its power Wal-Mart has struggled a bit in the US in recent years, trying to broaden its appear without particular success and then struggling along with its customers during the economic difficulties of the last two years -- was starting to return things like guns and sewing cloth to its stores because it came to realize that these slow-moving items were more important to generating customer traffic with its core customers than they had appreciated.

And this made me feel better about one of my passionately held beliefs about Borders, that the major blow to the chain came in spring 2008 when the company reduced title counts at its stores. How can I possibly think that dropping titles that might have sold so few copies would be the killing blow? But I did, I do, I always will, and it's that sentence in that WSJ article this week that sums it up. No, the books hardly sold worth a damn, but the customers who did buy deep into the catalog were important customers.

Some differences which I think made this effect even more important to Borders. I think the customers who didn't buy the books still kind of noticed them, and that their presence enhanced the overall impression of the brand, more than is the case for these items Wal-Mart is returning to the shelves. And more important, there are still guns and sewing cloth to sell so Wal-Mart can turn back the clock and stop selling them. The deep catalog advantage at the best Borders was built up over a fifteen or twenty year period, and many of the books Borders stopped selling went out of print and bye-bye without Borders to sell them, making it harder to just put them back on the shelf after a year or two away. It's also one thing for books that don't sell a lot of copies to justify continuing to sell them here or there as a matter of happy inertia, and another thing to decide to get back in the business of selling books that don't really sell all that well.

Bottom line is that when George Jones was saying on conference calls in the quarters following the reduction in title count that he ordered that same store book sales were down by 13% and we think a few points of it is from overdoing the drops in title count, I think he was underestimating the real impact of what he had done.

A Dozen Eggs Breaking

Publishers Lunch links to the updated Borders closing list, with another 28 stores scheduled to close by the end of May, 12 of those stores that I have visited. As with the original list it includes stores of all shapes and sizes. Hollywood & Vine that did business but I doubt ever enough for the rent at that location. Milpitas CA which I will miss, because it was one of the nicest stores in the country for selling sf/fantasy on the day I visited. Fairfield CT, which I was surprised to see wasn't on the original list and which I'd visited on opening day and occasionally since as a quick on/off Metro North. Stamford CT is a somewhat historic site, as it had been put up by Waldenbooks prior to its purchase by Borders as part of their budding "Bassett Books" chain of superstores, the original location in Towson of Borders #44 that is now in Lutherville MD had been another. Braintree MA and Tacoma WA had both once been extremely prosperous, and I don't know if their demise reflects high rent or half of their business going elsewhere over the past several years. Federal Way, WA and Cranston, RI are both stores that had relocated to supposedly better locations. The store in downtown Philadelphia PA is another surprise because that store sold a lot of books and was still doing so at my last visit, but it was also a big store in a high rent location designed for selling books, music and movies (in fact, a relocation of an older smaller location that may have been books only) and likely has too big a rent bill for a time when there isn't much of a music and movie business any more. You think on these relocations and you realize how miserable the Borders strategists were at forecasting the demise of hard copy content sales.

In its bankruptcy filing, Borders reserved the right to close up to 75 more stores, so the additional 28 suggests that at least some stores were given rent concessions to help keep afloat. The very un-busy Glendale Queens store as an example gets to enjoy life still. Stores like Hollywood & Vine or in downtown Philly, there's not much of a chance the landlord will do Borders any favors because locations like that can almost certainly find new tenants.

I visited one ongoing Borders in Manhattan this week and one that is closing. Even a going out of business sale with 30% off and an extra 10% off for Borders Rewards (around 36% total discount) doesn't seem to move sf/fantasy at the Park Ave. Borders, which has many depleted sections but sf/f looking like it was hardly touched, and overall still has a surprising amount of inventory four weeks after the liquidation sale started. They're about ready to bring down the remaining merchandise on the 3rd floor music/movie area, and part of the 2nd floor was closed off. I was undercharged for my purchase, pointed it out, waited around while they re-rang, gave them an extra $10, and was given $18 in change. I didn't point out that they had now made a bad situation for them worse.

The front of store at the Columbus Circle store that is to remain open still had lots of books and looked very full. To give Borders credit for something, they've done a decent job of scrounging and scraping for inventory to give a good initial impression of things when you walk in the front door, and that is important. The store still had customers going in and out, but when you got into the actual section shelving you did notice that things were a little lighter inventory wise than usual. A theoretical order for 4 copies of Kings of the North by Elizabeth Moon had turned into an actual order of 2 copies coming from Ingram, this goes on sale Tuesday and at least they'll have some. There were some books being reordered and on the way from one source or another, and 120 copies on order for the mass market of Charlaine Harris' Dead in the Family that is on sale in a couple of weeks. At the same time, there was supposed to be a promotion for the new Mark Hodder book in FOS Bay 4 from 15 March for 2 weeks, but no Borders stores have actually gotten the book, and who knows when or how or from who because the publisher can't be entirely pleased to have some money owing as a result of the bankruptcy. So it's a very mixed bag, the stores are there and open and at some level getting the titles they need to have to look that way, but they're going to suffer if they can't start to get back to ordering and restocking in the usual way.

A funny store I'm told third-hand. The closing stores are essentially managed by the liquidation company at this point, and as the romance section was being relocated and consolidated at Borders Wall St., management decreed that books should be arranged by price because people would be coming in to hunt for bargains. The employees did say that this was not such a good idea, and then did what they were told. Well, I'm looking for a bargain too, but if I'm going to find my bargains they better still have a semblance of alphabetization because I'm not that kind of a bargain hunter.

In other book news from Publishers Lunch, indie chain Joseph Beth is putting it up for sale and closing an additional store. They haven't been able to come up with a reorg plan that everyone likes since filing for bankruptcy in the fall, and the sale process now seems like the only way to keep any of the business ongoing.

And if you're interested in UK book news, here is an article from The Bookseller where the head of Waterstone's says the UK may have as much as 3 million excess square feet devoted to book distribution (not stores, but distribution facilities) and that he'd like to bring return rates down below 10%. A competitor says this would be too low because you then aren't taking enough chances, and this is in fact correct. Since it's impossible to tell in content business what will or won't work when it actually confronts the public, you need to be able to take a few uncertain bets in order to find the things that will work.

Borders update

Borders CEO Michael Edwards gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal and the company also had a conference call with creditors, which was covered by Publishers Weekly and Publishers Marketplace. The company will soon decide, based on discussions with landlords, on the fate of an additional 25 to 75 stores that may close. Publishers Marketplace does a good job of putting this into perspective. The 200 stores liquidating now were all drawn from the not quite 500 superstores so it was a full 40% in the initial round, and as few as 145 of those 500 stores were solidly profitable. That is a scary statistic. These articles differ on whether it not there will be a round of closings for the smaller format mall and airport stores.

The company is getting supplied by major suppliers on a cash basis. It is begging for the major publishers to resume shipping on regular terms. Good thing to hope for. Costco will brag in its annual reports that it churns inventory so fast it is often getting paid by its shoppers before having to pay suppliers, Borders has to pay suppliers long before it gets any money from customers. Publishers Marketplace doesn't see why anyone would resume selling on net plus 30 when Borders had a 50% return rate then stopped paying then went bankrupt, but after a point if publishers want to keep a diminished Borders around they will have to take some risks on resuming normal trading terms.

While the company will continue to sell a variety of e-readers in stores it intends to fully invest its marketing and promo efforts in the Kobo. In exchange Kobo will give Borders a piece of all of its US ebook sales. Publishers Marketplace hates this, says selling the same old also-ran eReaders as it has been as it's fallen behind in the business is more of the same old. I disagree. Barnes & Noble isn't going to start selling the Nook at Borders. It can do so at Books a Million because BAM is still a smaller chain with a smaller selection with a much smaller national footprint while large parts of the BN business plan in recent years are driven by gains based on consolidation, I.e., Borders going away. Amazon isn't going to start selling the Kindle at Borders. The only good strategy for Borders is to be the one bookstore chain that offers eReader choice instead of our way or highway. The only choice is selling things that aren't Nook or Kindle. Getting a few pennies on every Kobo ebook sold could be a valuable lifeline to Borders especially as the cash needs of the company will be much smaller moving forward because of the reduced store count and reduced drain on resources from unprofitable locations. Kobo needs the Borders distribution channel, especially with its Australian business now hurting due to the RED Group bankruptcy there. This is an intriguing development, one of the better pieces of news in the Borders Bankruptcy stew.

As in any major bankruptcy that isn't pre-packaged there are disagreements over how much time to give current management to come up with a reorg plan. Creditors want June, Borders as late as August, looming over is when people can plan for holiday ordering. Creditors say the Borders Debtor in Possession financing is both too big for immediate needs thus costing too much in fees while not being big enough to finance Borders thru the holidays. Publishers Marketplace does point out the inconsistency.

Website, Borders says they have lots of visitors but too many of whom leave without buying. Well, they don't offer the level of discounting that BN and Amazon do, they can't afford to necessarily, I don't know how Borders turns this around. And I like the Borders website now.

For a typical 25k sq ft superstore Borders would like to have 15k devoted to books and 10k for other stuff. This doesn't bother me prima facie other than for the implication that it could be yet another round of remodels for a company that has already spent far too much money and energy rarranging the deck chairs. Borders says sales at ongoing stores have surpassed expectations. Publishers Marketplace interpretation: people have been showing up at those stores expecting a fire sale and stay to buy things anyway. There are times I like the added snark and analysis on Publishers Marketplace compared to the offend no one blandness of Publishers Weekly, but today I do not. Yes, Borders is in bankruptcy, has been run like shit, may not survive, but Publishers Marketplace is so snarky on Borders now you get the impression that their stopped clock wouldn't even be right twice each day.

Bride of List!

All told I have visited around 80 of the Borders that are closing, adding two in Burlington and Peabody MA this past weekend.  Around 25,000 square feet, e average store that's closing.  Leave aside the drain represented by entire stores, each of those could have done it's business in 5000 fewer square feet, 5K x 200, and that's one million extra square feet floating around, and the troubling thing is that the 450 stores that remain open probably carry around another 2M spare tire around the belly, and the bankruptcy filing doesn't help that. 

Start at the top, alphabetically by state, and the Anchorage store is as typical an example as any.  When I visited Anchorage in 2006, the Borders was disappointing. I had been to the amazing Waldenbooks in Wasilla, which had an amazing selection in an amazingly small space, kind of a captive audience, and then the BN in Anchorage which was selling books in jaw-dropping quantity. And then the Borders?  Well, it was just OK. It had no doubt been first in the market, but clearly was no longer best. Move ahead four years and a remodel or two later with four years of likely declines in same store sales, with the music and movies sections gone, and then you would end up with that 31k sq ft box looking like the tumbleweed friendly environs of the Plano TX store in 2010. 

In the San Francisco area, we've got the too expensive flagship in Union Sq that's closing, the Pleasanton store in the Walmart mall where you can almost see the better-situated BN on the other side of the highway in Dublin, the Fremont store which I doubt ever made much money, and the store in San Francisco Center that is only 20k sq ft and doing a decent business but which must be carrying a heckuva rent bill. 

LA, there's the Century City store that replaced a prosperous small Brentanos with a Borders that I thought should have been a gold mine but somehow never came close. Pasadena was 40k sq ft, which can't be justified any more, and the equally large Glendale store that was a ghost town long before a spiffy huge BN opened across the street. I am surprised that the older Long Beach store is going, but then you see it's 30k sq ft which is too big even though it was still selling books. The newer store in downtown Long Beach was a shipwreck from day one. 

Connecticut us getting creamed. The Danbury store was quite prosperous in 2002, Milford is an upgrade from a Waldenbooks to a new wing of the mall by e movie theatre, and that's going. Manchester was a really nice store once upon a time but was in decline and started to look seedy and had a spiffy new BN to contend with -- and still had a better wider selection in the sf/f category than that spiffy BN as of Thanksgiving.  Is there any chance Borders could have sublet the old store several years ago and grabbed the BN location?  Southbury was a Waldenbooks replacement new concept store that opened less than three years ago. 

Chicago is getting creamed. It is the anti-DC, a market where every store seemed below average but where more and more and more were opened.  Huge swaths of the market are now being ceded to BN. But what does it say about the company that 16 of 29 stores within a 50 mile radius of downtown are closing?  Did they all start losing money only recently? I mean, the Evanston store was my first introduction to a seriously underwhelming Borders, and that was over a decade ago. 

And on and on it goes, stores that never should have opened (Commack NY) or ended up on the wrong side of the tracks when a better-located BN came along (Peabody MA) or too big and perhaps helped to their death by bad management (Westbury NY was not known for the quality of its alphabetization, and Monroeville and Langhorne PA a tad large), or relocated to make more room for more stuff even after the death of music-movies was on the horizon (Austin north), or strangely placed (Mt. Kisco is mediocre, White Plains is starting to fade, let's in-fill with a store in Scarsdale).

All happy bookstores are alike, all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own special way!

When I went to Dallas, I got annoyed that Borders was sending big national authors to their original Dallas area store that was big, cobwebbed, not looking very prosperous any longer, while there was a livelier happier somewhat newer store a few miles down the road. Why?  Because that was the old store where big tours had always stopped, thus they always should. The "good" news is that the friendly better nicer store is going to stay open, the original Dallas store will not. Alas, that inability to be fleet of thought remains intact.

Some people want to blame the Borders inventory stickers as the quintessential example of inefficiency. Um, NOT! Stickers told employees where to shelve books, every store has to do that somehow, you can go to a BN and watch employees spend time scanning books to figure out where to shelve them, which is its own kind of inefficiency. Books needed to cross the warehouse and go from the incoming boxes tome outgoing boxes, sticking along the doesn't add a lot of time. The process could cause an efficient business to take ten days instead of eight to move a book, the problem at Borders was doing in weeks what BN could do in days, and Books a Mllion and many other stores use stickers.

No more long Borders posts forma while, unless developments warrant.

The Ten & Five Stores

For general impressions of the closing Borders see my last post here  This will start some store specifics.  I believe that Borders #10 at the White Flint Mall in Kensington/Rockville MD and Borders #50 on 18th and L St in downtown Washington DC were in their prime two of the best bookstores in the entire country. 

Store #10 was one of the first stores opened by the brothers Borders as they expanded across the US. It was the second Borders I ever visited, my late uncle Matthew dropping me off at the Bethesda Metro station with instructions on how to find my way there as I was heading home after from something or other. I loved it. It was exactly like the experience of visiting the original Borders, and I no longer had to go to Ann Arbor for it. I was upset they were not carrying Simon Green's Blue Moon Rising in it's original Roc edition. That store was in a small standalone retail building on Rockville Pike, subsequently filled with an Anthropologie and now vacant; the Borders proved so popular that it was no more than a few years before it left its books only building behind for an anchor location in White Flint across the street, with one of the hugest Borders signs you could see facing the Pike. And it was so popular there they even took over adjacent space for an even bigger selection. What a selection!  What a crowd on a Saturday night!  So many books sold, 30 copy initial order of Elizabeth Moon's Sporting Chance, if I recall.  I could easily and happily spend an hour or more there, looking at every end cap, reveling in the crowds, checking the behind stock of the sf section. 

The 18th and L store opened a bit later, probably after the K-Mart purchase of Borders. It was in the basement levels of a DC office building. It was hard to appreciate just how big the store was because it was on two levels and the lower was in an L shape with the walled off music and movies section taking the lower part of the L so you didn't know about the foot of the L if you didn't head in. It's Saturday night was lunch hour. Every lunch hour. If you could get a book on the new mass market table to be admired by the lunchtime throngs you could sell ten copies in a week easy. I tried hard over the years to fill an empty slot on that table, or if the table was low to bring up copies from the sf section downstairs. 

As Borders did in those days, the front of store at each was full of facings and tables that reflected the character of the store. The downtown store would be big on politics, and there were books displayed in quantity there that you didn't see elsewhere.  The White Flint store would long retain some of the tweedier university town aspects from being one of the first stores out of Ann Arbor. Both easily carried over 100,000 book titles, well over. The downtown store was never as strong in horror, both sold sf/f in such large quantities.

Both stores, when I might commonly expect to see 55 or 60 JABberwocky titles in a superstore, I could go here and find 80 or 90. White Flint may have been one ofmthe first stores where I found 100 titles when it wasn't a fully stocked opening day. 

So what happened?  

The downtown store didn't face direct competition, but it's sales were clearly slowing because of environmental conditions. Not just the ebook. The first superstores tended to open up in core urban or suburban locations. As the population migrated out and more stores opened in the suburbs, the original core stores lost business. In DC right now the more outlying stores in Germantown and Columbia MD or Fairfax VA may be among the most profitable. 

But beyond that, Borders happened to Borders. A Barnes and Noble opens on Rockville Pike a mile up from the Borders. Not very happening at first. But over time, even though the Borders has a theoretically bigger selection the long lag time in replenishment will mean that you cannot actually find your book, as could the Borders quirk where a book that got shipped to the wrong store would be listed as received at the theoretical destination instead of the actual. 

Both stores were hurt by the cash crunch in 2008 when title counts were reduced chain wide. The presence of a rare find like a Hot Blood anthology could no longer make up for the missing 2nd Deathstalker novel that sold three weeks ago and still hadn't been reordered. 

The corporatizing of Borders hurt. These stores once had character, personalities distinct to their neighborhood, visibly so when you walked in the front door. As more and more of the front of the store was sold off to paid publisher placements, and as the stores themselves were renovated with the new hardcover facings taken away and/or becoming "FOS Bay 07" on the chain wide weekly displays, the titles that gave that character to the stores were forced into the section where if lucky maybe the store had an extra endcap. With the title count reductions in 2008, many of the books that gave character but sold eight copies a year over the entire chain were removed completely. 

And oh, those remodels. These are two of the stores that I saw in at least four incarnations. The original, the original with diagonal lines removed, the navigability/mixed hc-mm genre shelving, then the booting out of the music and movies, then the filling out of the space. At one point in time half the sf/f at White Flint was put in upstock, which didn't make things easy to find, so up the road to the BN the customers would go. In the final remodel at 18th and L, the old lettering Borders sign was taken down and replaced with a sign with the new logo. This offended me as a Borders purist. More to the point, while that new sign did give brand consistency it did not sell an extra piece of merchandise, and it cost money which Borders did not have. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I do not think Barnes and Noble has spent energy swapping out signs with it's original somewhat more ornery lettering, and even though I am not a BN purist, I still find this stores and smile when I walk in because I know the stores with the old lettering have more history behind them. 

And oh, those remodels!  Let me say it again. Every dime Borders spent on those remodels made the stores less interesting to me, less attractive, less fun to visit, had me spending less time in the store. That has always worked well enough for BN because the business has always been thus. Borders built it's business on a different kind of customer, and slowly replaced it with people wanting to use "40% off any one item" coupons. 

I last visited White Flint in December, and 18th and L just a two weeks ago. They were so much quieter than once upon a time they were. I was at 18th and L right about noontime, and it was busy-ish but not like the lunch hours of my recollection. 

That said, both stores were still selling decent quantity of books. Both had better selections, and better selected selections, than a typical BN. On some titles, White Flint could still outsell the BN a mile up the road. 

Why are they closing?  Too big. The White Flint store was over 40,000 square feet. When they took out music and movies, they had enough space left to put in a boxing ring and spectator seating. They did shuffle and move and fill out the space, but they were doing a nice business for a 27K store maybe even with steep rent, but there was no way they could ever do 40K sq ft of business. The 18 and L store was around 37K, same problem. 

Store #85 at Pentagon City has faded as much or more as either of these stores, but maybe three years back Borders was able to give back space to the landlord. That store remains open. 

Can you tell that I will miss these stores, not so much for their faded presents but very much as once upon a time they were. 

The List

As you can imagine, I spent a good chunk of time looking at the list of Borders that will be closing in the next six to ten weeks following the chain's bankruptcy filing this morning.

I'll have more to say about some individual locations or other specifics, but a thing or two worth noting:

First and most important, a store's fate didn't depend on sales alone. Which might be my biggest sadness about the list. My hope had been the Borders would close a third of its stores doing 20% of its business, but it just ain't so. The rent and square footage ended up saying as much about a store's profitability as the quantity of books it is selling. So here in New York City, there's a store in Glendale, Queens that is still remaining open, in a failed attempt at an upscale shopping mall. So failed that the shopping center itself was just sold at a bankruptcy auction. Hence, the Borders survives. Why? Well, along with the movie theatre the Borders is one of the few traffic generating assets in this failed mall, the rent has probably been dropped to a pumpkin slice and iced mocha at the Seattle's Best cafe, so Borders can keep it open as long as they make payroll. This means the effect on book sales is likely to be bigger than I'd have wished. Yuck!

That being said, there are so many of these stores more than once over many years that have clearly never lived up to expectations, and have clearly been drains on the company even during the good old days. From Kips Bay in Manhattan to Friendship Heights in DC to Century City in LA to a good half dozen of the stores closing in the Chicago area, Borders is finally free of stores that never worked to their rent rolls and expectations, and a company that is free of those many dozens of bad eggs is a better, stronger company on many levels.

However, every store has to contribute to overhead. With fewer stores there are still certain fixed costs that don't go away. The surviving stores have to make an even stronger contribution to overhead in order for the company to have any good chance of moving forward in slimmer shape. Considering the problems Borders has had in recent years, this is sadly not a sure thing.

There is no one type of store that seems to have survived better than some other type. There are new concept stores from 2008 that are gone (Southbury, CT). There are stores in major urban locations (18th & L, DC). There are stores in weird rural locations (Colleyville, TX). There are Waldenbooks replacement stores (Southbury, Milford CT). There are stores in fancy downtowns (Los Gatos, CA). There are new stores and old stores. The problems at Borders weren't limited to this thing or that thing, but to anything and everything.

There's still no recognition that the company needs to use the strengthened cash position it could have coming out of this filing to strengthen its supply chain, speed replenishment, and update reordering and inventory systems to match B&N. The bankruptcy filing still lists things like "strengthen Borders Rewards Plus" and "start selling related non-book items" as the major focus areas of the turnaround plan. These things aren't going to cut it, if they don't deal with the supply chain.

Personnel? Let's say you're a good GM who's been working at a store selling lots of books with too high a rent, and there's some other store that's surviving because the rent is cheap even though the store itself is managed like shit? With all the tumult, are there people who are going to try and be sure the bad GMs are the ones who end up exiting, and the better GMs will somehow find their way to the stronger remaining stores? Of course there are also a lot of hourly employees who are out of work now, many of them wonderful people. I think here of the clerk at the LA/Howard Hughes Plaza Borders who helped track down copies of some Peter V. Brett books when we did drive-by signings in the area last August. There are a lot of great people like that.

Recovery: Borders needs to make May Day into Borders Day, or something. Somebody needs to work on having a major event with the best author they can possibly find at every surviving Borders store as a way to get some people into the store, make people aware publicly and in a very big way that the surviving stores are in business. I doubt there's anyone working on this.

The closing list emphasizes the folly of all the money Borders spent on remodels. If the store was losing money, did it really matter if it was losing it selling music and movies instead of bargain books? There's so much mis-deployed capital investment represented here.

This is a terribly sad day for me, made at least tolerable because it's the necessary and too long in coming capstone to an event that was becoming inevitable. Several of the earliest Borders stores I ever visited are soon to leave, many of them stores I used to love to visit, that once were truly marvelous stores to shop. There are business concerns I think about, this is real shitty timing with regard to the paperback releases of Oath of Fealty by Elizabeth Moon and The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett as an example. But my thoughts are less there right now, than with the long-time friends I am losing.

after the fall

One of my clients was wondering what effect a Borders bankruptcy might have on major publishers.

At least there, the answer is "not as big as you might think." Let us say Borders was 12% of the company's business, and that Borders was not paying for two of the biggest holiday months, so that this would be more like 1/3 of their annual billing with Borders than 1/6 of it. So that ends up being around 4% of your expected income where you've actually paid for and printed and shipped books and incurred all of those costs and you're stuck with the bill. Now, that's a big hit. A very big hit. It could take your expected profit and narrow or shrink it, maybe even put you into a loss situation for the year. But it's an absorbable hit, especially when you realize that most of the major publishers are part of huge international conglomerates with publishing operations in lots and lots of different countries. And this isn't the first time a major player in the industry has gone bankrupt. Borders UK went belly-up 14 months ago, and a major distributor in the US went belly-up several years back.

There are other effects. There are some books that went to press with the expectation that copies would go to Borders, and now those books might be sitting in the warehouse instead. Moving forward, there will be fewer Borders stores, the number circulating is that 150-200 of around 450 may close in a bankruptcy filing. Some of those sales will be lost. However, it's important to keep in mind that the stores that are closing, many of them will be stores that have not been doing a lot of business in recent years, maybe a few like the Borders on Park Ave. in Manhattan that does a decent business but with too high a rent, but if they close 35-40% of their stores, those stores are likely to be closer to 20% of the actual business Borders has been doing. So that would be something like 2.5% of the business that will disappear or migrate to other bookstores or sales channels. There are some stores that don't have a B&N anywhere nearby, Kris Rusch talked about how her one hour drive to a Borders would become two hours to a B&N, so if that Borders were to close there would clearly be people who wouldn't drive two hours to buy a book. But in other instances, if the Borders in Commack closes people are all driving out there anyway, most of them can drive another mile, mile-and-a-half to the B&N in Commack.

Even right now, I went into the Borders in Kips Bay Manhattan on Wednesday night, and it certainly didn't have that dying bookstore look that I've seen before, like in the final years of Wordsworth in Harvard Square. Borders is paying cash for important books they need to have to keep the business going, Ingram is still supplying on terms unknown. I don't think unsecured debtor publishers will get zero cents on the dollar.

Right now, we're in that time when nobody knows exactly what happens. The Kips Bay Borders is theoretically getting 4 copies of one Del Rey book I have in March, 3 copies of another. Will they pay cash to Random House, or get them from Ingram, or not actually get them? If there is a bankruptcy filing, this store will almost certainly be on the list of those closing, so will they still get books intended to arrive two or three weeks after the filing, or will they cancel them? Multiply this out by lots and lots of books and you can see how much uncertainty there is. So we worry. We should worry. But this will not likely be the end of the world.

This is not to say there are not smaller publishers in the world or publishers without a cushion or publishers who do a much bigger share of their business with Borders who will feel this much much much harder than the average publisher. And yes, some of them may end up going under as an aftershock if Borders goes under.

Also, there will be some books, the Goblin books by Jim Hines are an example of books that are carried at Borders and not at Barnes & Noble, and there will be particular books that might die if Borders dies. However, if Borders does not die completely but does live on with 62% of its current store base which does 80% of its current business, those books may not die. This may not be as bad as when Borders entirely dropped titles in spring 2008 when it first developed liquidity issues. And even then, keep in mind that books die on a regular basis when B&N or Borders decides to cut a title loose.

Part of me thinks I'm being too rosy in this blog post. Let me emphasize again, there are some books and some authors and some publishers that will get hurt very badly, that are already hurt very badly by what's happened already, perhaps fatally. And if 200 stores close, there could be thousands of employees who lose their jobs, just as hundreds already have at the 50 stores Borders closed in the last six months and at the warehouses that have been closed and in positions that have been made redundant at all levels of the company. At the same time, as I've said for a long time, publishing has been dying for as long as I've been in the industry, just shy of 25 years, and the industry still lives. It will still be around, whatever the fate of Borders, six months or six years from now.

If Borders closes 200 stores, plus all the stores already closed... I'm trying not to be a piler-onner. There are clearly a lot of bad real estate decisions. But some of those bad real estate decisions, I'd have made. Borders #228 in Manhattan, I'd have signed that lease twelve or fifteen years ago. New retail development in an underserved area of Manhattan, no bookstore in the immediate vicinity as we reckon such things in Manhattan, adjacent to a big 15-screen Loews movie theatre I'd have signed that lease, darned tootin' I would have. And it was a nice store, with a nice selection when it opened, a perfectly delightful place to go shopping. And I can't tell you why that store never did a particularly good business. Never. The problem isn't the lease, per se, but how long of a lease it was, that the store's been open more than ten years doing not such a good business and probably not making very much money even in its best of days, and the only way to escape the lease is to go bankrupt. There are other decisions that seem more questionable. Clearly they overpaid for the Park Ave. location. The King St. San Francisco store that closed in the fall, that store I don't know where they were thinking they'd find customers. All those decisions have been compounded by an inventory system that didn't give bad stores a chance at redemption, and by spending lots of money to remodel stores that never had better days and never were (the philosophy at Sears which hasn't spent tons of money remodeling stores thus earning demerits from many who write about such things does have its merits). But if a bad decision is only bad with the benefit of hindsight, let us admit that that decision, at least, wasn't bad at the time.

More Shoes Dropping

So sneaking out the news on a Sunday night, Borders put out an official press release to say it's not paying publishers for January, and now starting to skip rent payments as well. This follows a press release last week to say that they had a contingency-riddled commitment to new financing.

It's going from sad to worse. Borders is so poorly managed right now that it can't even go bankrupt right.

As I mentioned on New Year's Eve day, you have to pay your landlord before you pay anyone else, because your landlord is the one person who can change the locks and keep you from accessing your inventory. And if things are so bad you aren't paying your landlord, then you should have just gone into Chapter 11 long before, but as I suggest here that poses ego issues and money issues to some very rich people who've made some bad bets on Borders. Because of those rich person egos, Borders has engaged in a long drawn-out process that has pissed off employees, publishers, landlords, pretty much anyone whose help you'd need to get you through a crisis.

In the midst of this, they still aren't engaging the main long-term problems with the business. Their salvation plan if people help them is to do more with Borders Rewards Plus, gain internet and e-book marketing share, change the product mix to alleviate the digital migration in books, reduce costs, and invest in IT to improve customer experience. For almost all of these things, they're late to the party. And I don't see the supply chain discussed anywhere. For fifteen years, the top people at Borders have been immune to the idea that you can't be in competition forever taking eight weeks to do what your competitor does in eight days, but that's been the story of Borders existence, late not just to that but to the internet and to e-reading and to everything else.

Publishers are not persuaded by this. Why should they be? There's that definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over with hopes of a different outcome. So the $125 million in "junior debt financing provided be certain vendors and other lendors" isn't going to happen.

There's also a requirement to have financing arrangements with vendors, landlords and other financing parties. Not gonna happen.

And finalization of a store closing program to identify underperforming stores to be closed as soon as practicable. And this is a problem. Borders has only 12 leases expiring in 2012, and of the 508 superstores open for business around a year ago, 369 had leases that were ending five or more years in the future. If the business was going well, or if the economy wasn't in a spin where leases can today be renewed at lower rentals in many instances, people would look at all of these long leases and think the people at Borders were geniuses. But when things are going bad, they tend to go really bad. And since Borders isn't certain to be paying its rent tomorrow anyway, no landlord has a big huge interest in working with Borders to protect rent that's due a year or five years from today.

The word from Publishers Weekly is that some publishers are so discouraged they might try to make a fuss if Borders goes to court with debtor-in-possession financing, which is the credit line you get when you go bankrupt to keep you afloat during the reorg, which is given priority over all other loans for repayment. If you're refused that financing, you can't keep going during Chapter 11, and would have to liquidate.

I'm not sure there's anything left to save in a Chapter 11. If I thought there were good solutions that current management or any management at Borders could execute which might keep 200 or 350 or some number of stores profitable moving forward, I'd want that very very much as would everyone in the publishing industry. But when I'm looking at how miserably this final descent into bankruptcy is being managed, when I'm looking at the competition from the internet and e-books where Borders is so far behind the curve, when I'm looking at the continued failure of management even today to recognize the core realty that the company has to upgrade supply chain and replenishment and inventory consistency/brand identity... And all that doubly and triply so because the non-bankruptcy of the company the past five weeks has so damaged relations with anyone and everyone.

And I'm not even thinking about the customers. Unless Ingram is still supplying Borders during all of this, the shelves are going to start to look empty and depleted and who'll be left wanting to shop there...

I have a stock certificate from when Borders had a stock split in 1996, and those few dozen shares will soon be suitable for framing. The original shares from pre-split I'd sold off long ago and recovered costs. It's not worth the effort to send the certificate by registered mail to the broker to sell.

I've been to 233 Borders locations (for Australia, I counted any store which Borders originally opened, but not stores like the one by the WorldCon hotel that opened subsequent to the sale of the operations Down Under), 216 of those are US superstores. I'm torn between wanting to accumulate a few more notches in my belt before they disappear, or finding something morbid about it. Borders had somewhere between 540 and 550 total US superstores opened, if you look at stores that relocated and which need to count twice, we might be talking about 570 or 580, something like 475 in operation now and 25 more already scheduled to close, so I've visited not quite 40% of the total US store base. If I can perform death watch at another 20 stores, I can lay claim to a pretty clear 40% inclusive of relocations.

quick newsy notes

Even though Barnes & Noble likes to brag about how wonderfully they're doing, the cost-cutting bug hasn't skipped over. Here Publishers Weekly discusses the impact on small presses of B&N's recent layoff of some four dozen staffers, including several long-time buyers and merchandisers which include the company's director of small press and vendor relationships. Holding to the truism that companies don't like to mayke announcements of bad news, there is no B&N release on the layoffs, their latest is to wax enthusiastic about periodical sales for the Nook.

The news from Borders is that publishers are supposed to indicate next week if they will trade their accounts receivable for a promissory note. And there were more layoffs at HQ. They raised some cash by selling their Day by Day calendar kiosk business to Calendar Club. Can't be much, though, because the kiosks are a seasonal business, and the business can't be much more than selling the rolodex of contacts to talk to about leasing space next year. Somebody I know who works at a Borders says they're on skeleton staff and still supposed to take out 80 more hours from the store payroll, and there's a big push to sell the Borders Rewards membership upgrades. I wish this process wasn't dragging on so long, annoying customers, employees, publishers, pretty much all of the so-called "stakeholders" as Whole Foods likes to call them. I suspect there are some ego issues involved. The very rich Bennett Lebow doesn't want to admit he made a mistake putting money into Borders last spring. Nor does the very rich and often full of dumb ideas William Ackman of Pershing Square Capital. They have too much at stake in a Chapter 11 filing, they're not afraid to have collateral damage in trying to avoid the filing. They're rich enough they can lean on a bank to refinance Borders, but the bank has to do something to make it seem like there's a good reason to put cash into the business hence the hard sell on the fig leaf of having the publishers share in the sacrifice. So it drags on.

The Queens Public Library is no longer buying books. They decided it was more important to keep staff and hours at the branches then to buy books to put into said branches, so until their funding renews maybe in July they've put a stake in the book buying budget. Ain't that cheery!

Our e-books, Borders links, etc.

I found my way to an Atlantic blog post by Peter Osnos, the person who founded Public Affairs Books, which is now part of Perseus, with his take on why Borders has declined so. It overlaps with but is somewhat different from my own. You can read his here.

According to Jim Milliot in this week's Publishers Weekly, Borders accounted for 8.5% of dollars spent on books in the third quarter, which was just under half the dollar share for B&N, and still for most people their third largest account. So you can understand the dilemma, that everyone wants Borders to keep going but at the same time it's hard to know what the good path forward is.

A quick update on the JABberwocky e-book efforts.

We love Amazon more and more with each passing day because they made it so easy for us to go up with titles for Kindle.

We will soon be up at Kobo, waiting to get a countersigned contract back. They were very nice, because we were actually able to negotiate a couple of points in the contract with them, instead of having everyone else's take it or leave it public boilerplate. And yes, there was an actual responsive person to talk to for doing this.

We have uploaded books to B&N, but they are taking several days now to process and have live on the site. With Amazon, we had some issues with documenting that we did in fact have rights to publish Simon Green books that had previous publishers, which we surmounted quickly with the help of the Kindle team people. Maybe B&N is looking at this, too? Maybe they're just slow. The fact that we were asked to prove our bona fides with Amazon was the pleasing kind of pain because at least it's differentiating them from the file share sights that happily allow you to share copyrighted work until someone complains. Gordon van Gelder put us in touch with an entire area on the Google Sites that's just endless links to pirated books, and Google's attitude is that they have no responsibility at all unless each individual person complains about each individual link.

We're not sure we'll sign up with the Google e-books store. Two issues. Most of the sites set default previews at 10% of the book (bringing this down was something Kobo alone was willing to do) while Google insists on 20% and you can only go higher. We're all in favor of previews, don't ask people to buy an e-book pig in an electon poke and all, but when you insist on at least 20% it goes from being the person who reads a few pages in the store to the person who takes a book, reads it all in the cafe, then plops it down with a broken spine and dog-eared cover that nobody will buy and you're left hoping the store will return it so it will be replaced with a fresh copy. And while their e-book store doesn't put ads on title detail pages, you can't participate without signing up for some old Partner Program that's all about how you get paid for letting Google put ads on to your book page. Add to that the usual miserable state of affairs on the Google help screens, where you can never find a phone # or person to speak to anywhere, and where you get sent around to forums where nobody posts questions and certainly nobody posts answers.

B&N is settling in somewhere in-between Amazon and Google, there are people you can e-mail if you look and ask hard enough but you never want to actually have to do it.

The iBook store is reasonable enough in line with Amazon DTP and B&N Pubit platforms. The problem here is that we weren't able to finish our sign-up process but got far enough along that the computer insists that the business has an account and cannot be allowed to sign up for another, but not far enough along that we can log in and do anything with our unconsummated account. We are waiting to hear from an "iTunes senior advisor" who is looking into this for us.

All six Simon Green titles are up and I'd say selling in line with expectations.

We're ready to go up with some horror anthologies, but need to fine-tune the ePub files adding in updated front matter and things like that, and then getting new cover copy written.

Mayer Alan Brenner's Dance of Gods series will probably arrive via JABberwocky by mid-February.

The next author we have plans to do in bulk will be Rick Shelley.

It is very exciting to have opportunities in 2011 to do something with these books that were unavailable eight or ten years ago other than to the most perspicacious souls, and as recently as two years ago to the extent they are today. It's a little bit scary as well.