Last night my wife and I hung out in Burlington for a few hours on a Friday evening, dining out and taking in the town. I was enamored of the idea of having a gyros (Ali Baba’s Kabob Shop). Anyway, we wound up hanging out at Borders. I walked its aisles, looking at the various books and DVDs and all I could think every time something piqued my interest was: I could get this for less or for free from the internet. I am walking through a graveyard.
My impression wasn’t helped by the fact that the same weird guy approached me twice to “help” me, the second time forgetting who I was; and that the cafe had been taken over by homeless people with various mental and emotional problems trying to get some respite from the cold. The whole thing seemed like some excruciatingly drawn-out exercise in business model thermal heat death.
Borders doesn’t even have its own website; it just rides on Amazon. The Borders Group corporate brochureware site is nothing but lifeless marketing-speak crap.
It’s really too bad the South Burlington Barnes & Noble store isn’t in downtown Burlington instead of Borders. As a meatspace, the store is simply better: roomier, more comfortable (there’s a fireplace, for crying out loud) and a better cafe. And there’s a connection between on and offline. You can return items ordered online to any store for credit. It’s not as good as ordering from the bookstore for delivery to home (if the book’s not instock at the store) or ordering online and picking up locally at a store, but it’s better than the Borders and Amazon “alliance”.
I can understand paying higher prices on books for extras like good help and an appealing, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing physical store customer experience—but you don’t get those extras at the Burlington Borders.
3 Comments
I confess I like bookstores. I also like libraries. I also like magazine stands.
Why? Because while my lovely 20″ iMac screen (or the other half dozen computers & screens in my home office) are great for quickly skimming astonishing quantities of information they’re simply not well suited for extended reading. The screens are laid out wrong (wide as opposed to long), the page layouts compromise to support this, text columns are nearly impossible, I’m limited to a few postures on my chair in front of the desk with my monitor, or with my laptop it’s an awkward clamshell balanced on my lap / couch arm / etc.
Yes, all of these can be overcome, but they’re already resolved in printed material. After several hundred years of continuous development books & magazines are generally high quality, well laid out, using conventions universally understood. Yes they don’t lend themselves to trivial searching and take up considerable storage space but those are limits I’m used to. Actually, I hope someday every piece of printed material will come with an embedded RF chip containing the digital content of my purchase for searching & quoting, bridging the gap between the two mediums.
Furthermore while I can get printed material cheaper or more recently online I can’t browse as easily. Yes Amazon et al are gaining ‘look in the book’ but it still isn’t as convenient as facing a shelf of books on a topic and quickly winnowing them down to the few with competent writing, sane indexes, and an appropriate text-content-to-’extras’ ratio. Inference-engines are nifty, but a this-book-is-crap filter would be better, and I can do that in person far more efficiently then online.
Then there is serendipity. Last time I was in the S. Burlington Borders I ran into three sets of friends, and this in a state I’ve never lived in (but have spent a fair amount of social time in.) I caught up with them, and was guided by them to a half dozen additional books, including two by yet more friends. We hung out in the Starbucks and had a nice time. Then later when I asked the clerk if the new Joe Keenan was out he KNEW WHO HE IS!
Conversely I’ve given up on the Church St. Borders. I’ve never known a clerk there to recognize a single author I’ve inquired about, including ones any reasonably literate person should be familier with. The store is awkward, ugly, and exudes the feel of the old B. Dalton / Lauriets chains right before they started dying out of malls. Indeed I noted last month that the Borders in Framingham Mass. must’ve closed sometime recently, while the 100m away the B&N I regularly shop at is busy opening to closing.
My hope is that eventually B&N will get aggressive about competing with Borders in Burlington and move into the mall-o-doom. A B&N would be an excellent, if unconventional, anchor tenant. The demographics are likely similar to what the mall seeks and while the rent might need to be negotiated with an eye to ancillary benefits I’m sure it could meet or beat those directly on the increasingly dire Church St.
Hi Michael,
Gee, your comments have made me regret not having entered Borders when I was strolling around Burlington. Must be swell place. Now. . .here in Eugene we have all sorts of bookstores, including all the brand names you mentioned. For example, our Borders is a great place for girl watching. And as a single guy, (having overcome a rather nasty ending to an overly long marriage) this has some appeal. But let me interrupt this email with the weather report for Eugene, which is, sadly, rain and more rain with a chance of sprinkles and drizzle. The really cool idea I have is to make Burlington and Eugene sister cities. As liberal cousins and small towns we are made for each other. I suggest we begin by swapping students from the U of O and U of VT and soon we will mind meld and achieve a oneness unknown heretofore in American history. As for myself, I am a writer of profundity and occasional serious wordage. You can Google my first novel (Cinema Verite). My main interest nowadays is to cut through the miasmal mediocrity that often clouds my musings and pull those darn dusty manuscripts from their wreck and ruin. Failing that, I am aspiring to become a Hollywood screenwriter, having seven screenplays under my belt even as we speak. As to why I was in Burlington. . .well I was snapping reference photos for a tourist map. It was my unsavory task to do whatever I wanted while I was there as long as it didn’t turn into a scandal and fortunately I skirted the long arm of the law and received nary a parking ticket. I met alot of people in downtown and also out in Stowe and Waterbury. The appeal of Burlington is that when one is holed up in a lonely loft overlooking Lake Champlain, with gale force icy winds whipping ever which way, it is a perfect setting to write, (unless one has a nimble blonde in the background yacking away about her lusty notions or whatnot). So if I have an inclination, I may return like our Lord (without a cloud!) and come when the sun shines in Burlington. And, by god, I will go inside Borders and tip my hat to that weirdo clerk and have myself a Starbucks coffee-mocha-frappa-thing. Nice to see you are out there writing away. Keep up the good work and try not being too negative. . .the world is full of that sort of attitude and it is refreshing to find a happy go lucky heart once in awhile. You owe me a nickel for this advice.
Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to comment. Brautigan, you must wear a tophat and a very long scarf.