Think Borders Is Going Down the Tubes Because of e-Books? Not So Fast

Philip White

Today’s guest post comes from Philip White, a writer based in Kansas City. A Lion in the Heartland, his forthcoming book about Winston Churchill’s unlikely journey to Fulton, Missouri to deliver the “Iron Curtain” speech will be released by PublicAffairs in 2012.

So it’s now official–Borders, the real-life Fox Books (come on, admit that you’ve seen Tom Hanks hamming it up as a nationwide bookstore mogul in AOL vehicle You’ve Got Mail) has filed for bankruptcy.

Many a web-based postmortem is fingering electronic books, or e-books as the kids call ‘em, as the perpetrator. After all, supposed industry bellwether Amazon recently announced that e-books in its proprietary Kindle format are outselling paperbacks, though, as is the company’s wont, they conveniently neglect to mention how many of these e-books are free, and avoiding giving precise sales figures.

So are e-books to blame for the fall of this once-mighty purveyor of the printed word? Not to the extent that many are claiming.

Certainly, the sales of e-books are continuing to rise. Cheaper and better devices, the shameless self-promotion of the Kindle by Amazon on its homepage and atop many of its book listings and cross-platform, multi-device support in the booming smartphone and tablet markets are just some of the reasons. Not to mention that a new e-book costs significantly less than its paper-based counterpart, and is, in many cases, available at the same time or before the hardcopy release.

But, for all the hype surrounding the rise of the e-book, many other factors contributed to the downfall of Borders, and most of its brick-and-mortar rivals. For the record, I will not be analyzing the viability of the online Borders offering, which may yet survive the follies of its physical location.

First to consider is one of the primary drivers of any consumer purchase: price. The reason that I get a coupon from Borders via e-mail each week–anywhere from 25 to 40 percent off a single item–is that the store often sells its wares at full list price. This can be above $30 for a new history hardback, and pushing $20 for a softback. Yikes! Meanwhile, Amazon, much to publishers’ chagrin, deeply discounts most of its titles from the get go. No need to waste money on e-mail marketing and website customizations that promote special offers when your upfront prices are already the lowest (with some exceptions, like during the run up to Christmas). I have also, in my forgetful way, gone to my local Borders to make use of a coupon and, as Sod’s Law would have it, left the offending item on the kitchen counter. Many retail employees at other chains would help a poor, forgetful bibliophile out in such a situation by simply scanning a coupon from behind their particle-board checkout counter. A fine fellow at Half Price Books recently handed me back a 20 percent off coupon “In case you want to use it again later in the weekend.” Not so at Borders, at least in my experience. No, they’d rather belittle you and huff and puff for a few minutes before eventually yielding. Yay, customer service.

Then there’s the convenience factor, or, in the case of Borders and its ilk, the lack thereof. Option one: Drive 20 minutes across town to a big box store strip mall, and, once there, weave in and out of the parent-with-screaming-kids coming out of Old Navy and the scary looking, 2-by-4 wielding fellow who looks like he wants to hurt this puny bibliophile for slowing his exit from Home Depot. Then spend 15 to 20 minutes, if I’m lucky, looking for a book that may or may not be in stock. Calling ahead doesn’t help, and even if it did, it’s just one more step. If, praise the Lord, the book is on a promotional stand there is a brief moment of joy–3 for the price of 2!– followed by the horrendous realization that every other book on that neatly-stacked table, is, bar none, utter tripe. So, even if I reluctantly, begrudgingly make the decision to buy the book anyway, I have to wait in line for who knows how long. The reward? Dealing with the not-so-friendly, can’t-wait-to-get-home-after-another-crappy-shift “sales associate” who hosed me on the coupon the previous week. Repeat the parking lot debacle. Waste yet more time (and gas) on the drive home.

Option two: From my tablet or desktop, log onto any online bookseller’s site. Time elapsed: 1 second. Yep, the higher speed home broadband’s worth every cent. Search for the book. Buy with one click. E-mail confirmation received. E-mail with reading recommendations customized to my purchase history to follow. True, there is the wait for shipping, but that’s not the point–it takes far less time and is far less a hassle to buy online. And if I, the Luddite, ever bury my suspicions and embrace the e-book revolution, my text will be delivered in a minute or two. I could, of course, select borders.com as my online bookseller of choice. But that will (or should I say, would, for we speak of the deceased) do nothing to support a bloated, unsustainable network of characterless warehouses that happen to house books. (Note to corporate execs everywhere–adding in-store “cafés” that sell mediocre coffee at inflated prices does not a comfy shopper experience make.

“But what of the tactile, in-store browsing experience?” I here you ask. True, I do enjoy it. At local, independent stores (selling used or new books) or chains such as Half Price Books, where the proprietors and staff members know their Stephanie Meyer from their Ernest Hemingway. At Borders, there was always the same experience I get at every big box store. Employees who like the company health plan but despise every other aspect of their job, and have no idea who John Lukacs is, let alone where to find his latest book. Does that apply to each and every staffer? No, of course not, but when it’s the case with even 30 percent, that’s a problem, and the percentage is far greater than that. Indie bookstores also find ways to set themselves apart–the exemplary Rainy Day Books here in Kansas City has many author events each month, and bundles tickets with a hardback to add value. Borders? Not so much.

Finally, Borders, Barnes and Noble and their kind annoy the daylight out of publishers and authors because of their pay-for-play positioning model. Publishers have to cough up outrageous sums to get their latest titles on the most prominent, front-of-store displays and they’re rarely going to fork over that money for anyone other than their cash cow authors–Meyer, Rowling, Grisham et al. Something similar may be true in Amazon's New and Notable section, but not to the same mercenary degree, I’ll wager.

So, do I sympathize with the thousands of Borders employees who will likely be seeking new employment? Yes, of course. Do I have the same sympathy for their soon to be former employer? Not a smidge. Like Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Borders has been outfoxed by a nimble, visionary competitor, baffled by new technology and, fatally, unwilling to change because of the misplaced belief that its overestimated brand loyalty would save it. Does the fall of this behemoth mean printed books are dead, or that e-books are the only viable medium? That is, for now, overstatement on both counts.

Teaching: An Imaginary Course on Very Cool Books

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, I killed some time creating an imaginary American history course. Its theme was not an investigation of some specific period of time. Instead, it was historiographical . . . in a peculiar way. It covered all the books that were revelations to me early in my career.

My course was chronological through my study of history. It started with Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a book that has been criticized from every direction and yet still seems to me to have gotten the most important part of a book right: it tried to answer a crucial question that sits at the heart of the conception of America. How did men who owned human beings come to espouse a philosophy of human freedom?

The next, obvious, book for my course was Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, a book I’ve cited so many times it’s the one citation I know by heart. The idea that political ideology was a world view created from ideas and experiences was such a revelation to me that I have spent my life studying it.

Richard White’s Middle Ground held me so spellbound that I read the entire thing standing up in the middle of a room; I couldn’t take the time to sit down on the couch ten feet from me. Who knew that you could look at American History from a completely different geographic perspective and tell a story that made sense—even more sense—than one told from the coasts?

I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in that same house, reading it cover to cover through the night during a week when I was the sole caregiver for a toddler and an infant—a good reflection of the significance of the book, but not a good decision for an already sleep-deprived mother. That anyone could weave such a textured portrait of colonial life out of the jagged threads of jotted phrases proved to me how much could be done in history, if only one had imagination and dogged determination.

At this point, though, my enthusiasm for my course slowed. The problem should be easy to see, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it until I actually taught White’s Middle Ground in a historiography class once. These books were such classics from the minute they appeared that their ideas have been incorporated into our general understanding of the past. While I was wildly excited about Middle Ground, my students remained unmoved. Finally, one of them explained that while the book must have been a revelation when I read it, they had never known any historical world in which what he wrote wasn’t common knowledge. They couldn’t get excited about something that was to them, as she explained, “wallpaper.”

So I went back to the drawing board for my fantasy course. This time, my “classics” would either be newer, or less widely known.

Elliott West’s Contested Plains makes the cut easily. It’s a thorough portrait of the relationship of humans to the environment through a close study of the Colorado gold rush of the 1850s, but West doesn’t stop there. His larger point is the immense power of ideas, and he steps out of the safe tower of the academic historian to suggest that it is imperative for humans to imagine new ways of living together.

Eric Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley is still my favorite example of just what strong narrative technique can do to illuminate history. His rip-roaring portrait of the search for just why Leon Czolgosz murdered the president does more to bring the late nineteenth-century to life than almost any other book I can think of. Hey, he even explains that Czolgosz was pronounced “Cholgosh.” For that alone, the book belongs on a list of classics.

Like American Slavery, American Freedom, Bonnie Lynn Sherow’s slim volume Red Earth asks the right question. If Indian, black, and white farmers all got land in Oklahoma at the turn of the century, and if they all lived under the same laws, why did the white farmers end up with all the land? Her careful, detailed study of the answer to that question has a number of surprises, and complicates our picture of race in America.

OK, here’s a surprise one: Robert Mazrim’s The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln is about archaeology . . . mostly, sort of. Mazrim is an archaeologist, and he puts the archaeological record back into his investigation of the human history of the Sangamo region of Illinois. The book combines history with an explanation of how archaeologists work and the meaning of what they find. And Mazrim has an unerring eye for the great anecdote or piece of evidence. Who knew a book about dirt in the Sangamo region could be a page-turner, but it is.

I’m going to leave this here, with four old classics and four new ones. But I’m not going to drop this idea (there is, after all, always time to kill). Other suggestions for books that introduce new ways to look at the historical world are most welcome.

Boston's Best Bookstore

Randall Stephens

Coming to the 2011 AHA in Boston? Have a moment or two to spare? Check out the Brattle Book Shop, near the Downtown Crossing and Park Street T stops. The store is one of the oldest in the country and is brimming with books, old and new. Sections on 19th-century history, European studies, Asian history, New England history, religious history, African-American studies, ethnicity, political science, and on and on line what seem like miles of shelf space.

I’m particularly fond of the outdoor area, which contains thousands of books for as little as $1 to $5 each. (See the video I shot, embedded below.) That space is open all year round, only closing when it rains or snows. (After a long Boston walk with my border collie Beatrice, I’ll peruse titles until Bea begins to whimper out of sheer boredom.)

As Beatrice waits impatiently, I’ve been surprised by how many great history titles I’ve found outside. I’ve picked up books there by Allan Nevins, Oscar Handlin, Gordon Wood, Pauline Maier, Patricia Bonomi, and many more. Also, I’ve been happy to track down unusual 19th-century travel accounts, memoirs, primary source collections, and all manner of biographies.

Brattle Book Shop is real must-see for history bibliophiles!

I asked Ken Gloss, proprietor, about his store and what a history professor, grad student, or history enthusiast might find there.

Randall Stephens: What makes the Brattle Book Shop unique? What would you say are some of its most distinctive features?

Kenneth Gloss: The Brattle Book Shop can be traced back to the 1820s and it’s been in my family since 1949. It is a Dickensian-style store. The outside stands hold about 2,000+ books at $1, $3, and $5. We have two floors of general used books, and a third floor with rare books, 1st editions, leather-bound volumes, manuscripts, etc.

We go to estates throughout New England almost every day. It is like being Jim Hawkins on Treasure Island finding great books and libraries and then bringing them back to the shop.

You never know what is new to the shop on

any given day.

Stephens: What sort of clientele do you serve? Does the Brattle Book Shop have a typical customer?

Gloss: We have every type of customer you can imagine. We’ve got street people who buy from our $1 tables, collectors who spend large sums on rare letters, manuscripts, rare editions, and the customer who just wants a hard-to-find volume. They are young, old, male, female, regular, one-time, compulsive, and interesting. We have one customer who comes in every day and calls in sick when he cannot get in.

Stephens: Many historians that I know keep an eye out for that gem of a book. What sorts of books at Brattle would catch the eye of a historian on the lookout for a bargain or a rarity?

Gloss: We buy and put out books each day. Many of those are by amateur historians, professors, and writers. So you never know what will be on the shelves. That is what keeps people coming. There are also many, many bargains.