My sister used to live in Ann Arbor, and on a trip to visit her in the late 1980s I remember paying homage to the Borders bookstore there. This was not the original Borders, a small used book shop which had opened in the early 1970s, but the rebuilt flagship of what was quickly becoming the second largest bookstore chain in the country, after Barnes & Noble.
I could have sneered. I was the owner of a hip little bookshop in New Haven at the time, one which was having trouble staying solvent thanks in part to the discount-happy Waldenbooks outlet in the Chapel Square mall. Big bookstore chains, we were told, would bring hasten the death of the independent bookseller.
Yet Borders was undeniably impressive. It wasn’t just touting volume (the stores were massive) but authoritative knowledge. There were specialists for each section of the store. They ordered and stocked titles which redrew the boundaries of what chain bookstores usually carried. Small publishers and obscure but vital publications were well represented.
Meanwhile, at the time, Ann Arbor had a host of other independent bookstores.
I thought Borders was a good thing, and I held that opinion at least into the mid-‘90s, by which time the chain had finally come to Connecticut bigtime and had also experienced the first of several wobbly moments in its corporate health. When it started to lose its luster, the chain diversified. But for a time it did so with the same specialists’ zeal with which it had originally distinguished itself. CD racks appeared, but offering a number of exclusive recordings by the sort of articulate singer-songwriters who might especially appeal to those who browsed at Borders.

A host of articles in the Detroit Free Press and elsewhere suggest that the ultimate demise of Borders, which shifted its corporate strategy from bankruptcy protection to outright liquidation this week, was due to diversifying too much. A lot has been written about Borders turning a dark corner when it started pushing stationery and hand lotion. Some might defend those products as in keeping with certain rarefied needs of obsessive book-readers. But much of the analysis concludes that where Borders really blew it was in devaluing the need for experts to manage its book sales. Without an informed, invigorated, enthusiastic staff to tout titles which customers would otherwise not have known about, Borders became indistinguishable from other gigantic places that sell books cheap.

I’ll save the corollaries to other struggling industries (newspapers) for another time. I don’t believe that the major brick-and-mortar book chains didn’t see the rise of internet book sales and e-book readers coming from years away—back in the ‘80s, when I first visited a Borders, there were already frequent articles in mainstream media about e-books and new electronic distribution systems. Where they lapsed was in good old-fashioned qualities like knowing one’s stock and being able to recommend it. Many of the small, independent bookseller who (unlike Borders) understand that are still around.