Day Thirty Nine
Didn’t work today (at Borders anyway. I got a lot of stuff at home done and some writing stuff too.) but I wanted to share a few things I’ve founf around today.
Business Week has a really insightful article that sheds a lot of light on Hilco (the company liquidating Borders) and the terms of the liquidation. It points out that even at a 30% discount some books are still more expensive than they are at Amazon.com. The books used in the article are Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy box set which was $100 originally at Borders. But now Amazon is selling it for $32.85. One has to wonder if this is on purpose, like are they trying to compete with Borders even as it liquidates? Clearly there is no way bookstores can compete with online stores especially when things like, publishers shipping books to online stores but refusing to ship to physical stores keeps happening.
The Business Week article also says Borders plans to use the money from the liquidations to “refurbish its 442 remaining stores and capitalize on the shifting habits of shoppers”. Excuse me, but didn’t they already do this? Refurbishing stores? How about competing with Amazon’s ebook offerings by establishing their own self/indie publishing program? I’m a published writer. You can find my books and anthologies on almost every major ebook site–except Borders because Borders doesn’t open itself up to indie (and by that I mean small press, not self publishing) or self publishing.
How about paying what they owe to publishers? Maybe trying to develop their own ereader that can kick the Kindles ass (in my experience a true fast, strong wifi tablet would be able to do that). Maybe doing away with their super special inventory system and working on something simpler (that recoding and stickering all their inventory when ISBNs and ISSN and UPCs already work fine elsewhere)? Or just making sure if in store customers have to order something the website doesn’t crash on them!
Ugh. I am so fed up with all of this. I mean, damn Borders, make the layoffs you just made of hundreds, if not thousands of people who loved books and worked hard for you mean something, you know?
Which brings me to this. It’s one of those canned Yahoo articles 10 Signs it’s Time to Quit Your Job. I used to love my job. Really, I thought it was awesome, even when I knew there were sucky parts, like the lack of communication with corporate, having to push the plus cards and the constant “No we don’t have that book, but I can order it for you.” but these last few weeks have been like someone was trying to infuse all the things on that list into each and every day.
Yeah, the next few months is going to suck, but I’m pretty sure being stuck at a going forward store under these conditions would be worse.
I would love to hear a higher up at amazon talk about how they feel about killing the small, independent, local bookseller. I had plenty of folks come into my store, take note of books, and I knew they were going to amazon to buy them. I couldn’t afford to have them at 20% off.
The sad thing is, which is what I found at BookExpo the year I went, is that some small publishers don’t care that amazon discounts their titles by 30-40% right off the bat. How can those small publishers get upset when small booksellers refuse to carry titles? Gingko Press, I’m looking at you. I guess from their standpoint, they can sell amazon 250 books in one fail swoop, where I’d order 2 or 3 at a time.
It’s just such a sad situation all around.