
You’ve Got Mail is Ripe for a Sequel - lloydarmbrust
http://seeinginteractive.com/newspaper-support-group/youve-got-mail-is-ripe-for-a-sequel/
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phuff
The news media keeps saying that Borders is going out of business in large
part due to e-books. But I have a hard time buying that.

I got a kindle six weeks ago and I love it. I think I've made one purchase and
it as $2.50 for scrabble from EA games. I have yet to buy a book, but I've
been reading a lot of the free books on it. I have a hard time spending a lot
of money on ebooks though. The local library is too good. I realize that due
to my cheap-skatedness I'm probably an anomaly...

Interestingly, a close family member works for a local used and new bookseller
with a nearly 100 year history. They have struggled mightily in the last 5
years or so, and now are unable to get a loan from any major bank because the
bankers say e-books are going to put all bookstores out of business.

Has anybody _exclusively_ begun using ebooks? I think amazon's real-world
bookselling are a much bigger threat to the likes of borders and the local
bookstore than it's e-books are, but maybe I'm just smoking crack.

~~~
cookiecaper
I think it's ridiculous to assume that all physical books are worthless. There
are reasons to prefer physical books, after all; they're easy to carry around,
they don't run out of battery or need any maintenance like charging, and
they're generally much cheaper than an e-Reader. If you're not a heavy reader,
and not many are these days, why would you spend $150 on a book-reading
device? You still have buy the books you would buy anyway, and you have much
more freedom buying individual books. e-Books may take a cut out of printed
books, but I sincerely doubt they'll obliterate them entirely.

On top of all that, used book stores provide much more value than big
commercial vendors like B&N because their selection is so broad and so cheap.
Used books are in general perfectly fine to be re-read, so people seeking
bargains on new books go there frequently; e-Books will generally not be
discounted very quickly, there is no such thing as a "used e-Book".

The _real_ reason used bookstores are going to be around for a long time,
though, is that there are A LOT of books out there. Even if someone was able
to digitize millions of books, there'd be millions and millions more that
would only be able to be found in used bookstores, especially with older
books. Just go into your local used book store and ask yourself how much of
that catalog is available on the Kindle, or will be made available any time in
the foreseeable future. It's a pretty small percentage.

~~~
sedachv
Maybe not worthless, but worth a lot less.

The biggest problem as anyone who owns (buys) a lot of books knows is what to
do with them once you've read them. E-readers will continue to get better,
more convenient and cheaper. My desire to try to sell used books on Amazon,
bookstores or donating them to Goodwill or the library (even though libraries
don't actually want your donations) will continue to remain low.

~~~
cookiecaper
I think there's probably a group that _likes_ having physical copies for the
enhanced accessibility and the ability to do whatever you want with the book
afterward. I know I would prefer to purchase a physical copy, because I know
that the physical copy is completely under my control, and I can resell it,
give it away, borrow it to a friend, etc. without a vendor's permission. I
expect many publishers are trying to promote eBooks because they can charge
the same without any shipping or manufacturing costs and because they can
track and control users much more tightly, preventing used sales and compiling
profiles about users' tastes, etc.

------
Timothee
"Borders is trading at 86 cents a share and has a market cap of 62 million
dollars. It has around 700 locations valuing them at less than $100,000 per
store"

That's a pretty shocking figure if you ask me. It's hard to believe when you
hear about some startups raising a few millions over an idea without any
business model... (e.g. come to mind the young though very popular Path and
Flipboard: $2.5M for the former, $10M for the latter, and I imagine valued in
the same range as Borders for these rounds)

I know that comparing web-startups to a brick-and-mortar business is not as
simple as that, but it does put things in perspective.

~~~
lkrubner
I assume the real estate under the stores is worth more than $100,000 per
store, so Borders must have a lot of debt, or the figure is irrationally low.
Or possibly, Borders only rents its land, but I find that a little surprising.

~~~
Timothee
On Google Finance, some links (that I haven't studied in details) seemed to
say that indeed Borders had a lot of debt.

"As Borders Group Inc. asks publishers for leniency on paying bills, the
bookstore chain has been in discussions with restructuring advisers about ways
to rework its debt-heavy balance sheet"

[http://blogs.wsj.com/bankruptcy/2011/01/07/the-daily-
docket-...](http://blogs.wsj.com/bankruptcy/2011/01/07/the-daily-docket-
borders-talks-with-restructuring-pros/)

------
mcritz
Maybe the problem with Borders isn't books — it's value.

Borders is Walmart with inky paper. It offers little more than what you could
get online at a fraction of the cost.

Shopping at locally owned book stores in Boston & Cambridge adds value to my
life because they have unique cultures & offer unique experiences. (Has anyone
here been to the basement of Brookline Booksmith or the tiny room in Rodney's
Books on Mass Ave?)

Bookstores are as important to Boston as jogging along the Esplanade, chilling
in the Common, coffee shops and bars.

~~~
foljs
Yes, only those kind of bookstores are in the same, and even bigger mess than
Borders is in.

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YuriNiyazov
Maybe I'm in an even further minority - I read math books for fun. The books
that I read are almost always either Springer books if they are recent, or
Dover books if they are older reprints. With math books, there is significant
value in being able to write in the margins - Fermat comes to mind. The amount
of infrastructure support required to get that working properly in electronic
form (either free-form writing, or LaTeX support) is more than what a
mainstream publisher would be willing to invest in. So, for me, it's still
paper.

------
msg
About those big-box bookstores... Barnes and Noble is doing just fine.

[http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/barnes-
nobl...](http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/barnes-noble-up-
borders-down/)

~~~
Umalu
Barnes & Noble is doing better than Borders, but I don't think it is doing
"just fine." B&N has been losing money in recent quarters and, while its Nook
is a more successful e-reader than the Borders Kobo, it is still far behind
the Kindle. If Borders dies, B&N will benefit in the short-term, but I am not
sure how well it will do over the long-term.

------
chops
This went a slightly different way than I was expecting. I expected it to be
more of an "AOL is dead, it's about Twitter/Facebook hookups now", a direction
which the author alluded to briefly at the end.

That said, the way it _did_ go with respect to Amazon and Borders is quite
fascinating, especially with the market cap and per-store statistic.

------
Tichy
Too bad, and somewhat hard to understand. I used to love the Borders stores in
the UK (while I still lived there).

Browsing Amazon isn't actually much fun. And the Borders stores always seemed
packed. What gives.

~~~
phuff
Honestly, I think a lot of borders' problems are mismanagement, not related to
Amazon as much as to other things. For a long time their online presence _was_
amazon, just branded with a borders logo, which means that they weren't
competing with Amazon online, which means that they didn't have the
distribution chains optimized the way that Amazon does, among other things. So
there's certainly a lot of pieces to the puzzle of their demise.

------
rokhayakebe
_Borders is trading at 86 cents a share_

I will never understanding stock markets and valuation of publicly traded
companies.

~~~
eru
Read "Security Analysis" if you are interested in valuations; and can stand a
heavy tome.

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stretchwithme
oh, it be ripe

------
sabat
"You've Got a Friend Request"?

"You've Got a Twitter DM"?

~~~
cagenut
Poke

