Issue 9: Books Without Borders

What did you do on the weekend? Do some yardwork? Catch up on your reading or some late night TV you recorded on your PVR? Maybe you left the house and spent some time catching up with friends on a patio with a cold, boozy drink and some good food. Or maybe you completed the final steps of running your formerly multibillion dollar corporation into the ground.

No, wait. That wasn’t you, that was Borders.

01. WHERE’S YOUR SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE NOW?

In February, the Borders Group announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. By Monday, just as everybody was doing whatever Garfields do, the company had announced that it was closing all of its locations worldwide. In accordance with the dominant narrative being played out for the past year or two in the news media, some commentators immediately starting connecting a bunch of things that looked like dots and started ascribing Borders’ ultimate failure, like all of the publishing industry’s recent woes, to digital books. My friend Hilary used the opportunity to talk about why she prefers physical books to digital ones and asked her readers what they thought. And I thought, hey, I think stuff about things! And here, somewhat edited and expanded from my comment on her site, are my thoughts:

This Borders thing? It’s the least surprising news I’ve heard in months, and not because of digital books. Borders didn’t fail because people stopped buying books; they failed because Borders was a terribly run business.

I get it, I really do. 19,500 people just lost their jobs and it’d be profoundly shitty to have that reason be that most of them simply jumped on a ship they didn’t realize was sinking, then here comes Amazon bragging about how they now sell more digital books than physical ones and Jesus Christ if they don’t make a perfect-looking villain. That’s a story that sells itself.

Here’s the thing, though: Borders didn’t go bankrupt because of digital books. The last time they made a profit was 2006, well before the Kindle was introduced and digital books became a significant market. They went bankrupt because they spent far too much on expansion and on unnecessarily large stores with digital media centres and flatscreen monitors. They took far too long to enter the online sales game, by which point they’d ceded far too much ground to Amazon. When they finally entered that market, they paid Amazon to develop and maintain their online sales site, but charged MORE than Amazon for the same books.

Just let that sink in for a minute. Does that sound like good business sense?

By the time they realized they’d made a horrible mistake, it was too late. Even more, it was 2008 before they had their own sales website. And by then, Amazon had launched the Kindle, Sony had launched their own eReader, and they basically paid a lot of money just to not even catch up. Despite that, it wasn’t until July 2010 that they announced their own eBook service and less than a year before they announced they were closing it to partner with Kobo Books, the successful Canadian eReader maker and eBook service, of which they bought 11%.

But it turns out that when you’re bankrupt, you’re still, well… bankrupt. And like I said, it’s been five years since the company made money. Borders has been sinking since well before 2006 and well before digital books punched an extra hole in the hull.

02. AESOP’S SOMETHING OR OTHER

But do you know who’s doing great? Well, yeah, Amazon is. But they were born online and they’ve more or less defined how the last decade in their industry has developed, and that’s no surprise. If it was only Amazon that was doing peachy-keen, we’d be in trouble. That would kind of play well with the whole “they’re killing the industry” thing, you know?

No, who’s also doing great is Chapters Indigo, Canada’s bookselling superpower, like China except with more child labour [Ed Note: Possibly untrue.] Not only are their stores busy and profitable, but they generally match Amazon’s prices (Read: the cheapest) online. Oh, and there’s that thing where they founded Kobo Books, a pretty great eBook and eReader company, to much success and a few international licensing deals. They realized that they had to adapt to the world or get murdered by the new kid.

Basically, they’re doing it absolutely right, and if comic book publishers don’t learn from them, they’ll probably get as much sympathy from me as Borders does. I’d be sad to see them struggle and I’d be sad to see them go, but really: we need these guys to step up, and so far I’m liking what I’m seeing. Since I first wrote about digital comics here, Dark Horse‘s iOS app now works with their internet interface and then there’s that whole thing where DC is going day-and-date with everything they publish. I’m absolutely ecstatic about these developments.

Why? Because the worst thing a comics publisher can be right now is slow or afraid of what’s coming. Just like Borders going out of business doesn’t mean people aren’t reading physical books, digital comics don’t mean physical comics go away. It’ll just mean terrible comic book stores who act like Borders will. But if the industry - publishers and sellers - act like they don’t need to change and evolve? What’s happened with Borders is going to be a premonition, I promise. And we shouldn’t shed a tear for any of them.

03. DENNIS “THE BOOKWORM” RODMAN

Why am I so confident about digital comics not ruining everything I hold dear about the medium? Because I learned from digital books.

I have a Kindle that I bought mostly on a lark with Christmas money a year and a half ago. While I was relatively skeptical at first, the experience has been a great one, for a few reasons:

• Size: A 700-page hardcover book detailing a firsthand look at 8 years of the Clinton presidency is something that’s just not convenient to carry around. It’s heavy and it’s bulky. Furthermore, while I LOVE books in all respects, the reality is that I barely have room for the ones I already have. At some point, something had to give, and being able to make a lot of my book purchases (though not all) digital ones has helped immensely.
• Travel: This is half an issue of size and half an issue of convenience. Finish a book at an airport but either don’t like the airport bookstore prices, selection or business hours? Bam. An entire giant library at my fingertips, available in 1min or less, no matter what the time of day.
• Lending: Yeah, I can lend out a physical copy of a book, and I often have. However, I’ve gotten a LOT of books back with dust jackets torn, covers dented or even with the occasional spill. Things happen; I once ruined a friend’s copy of The Once and Future King when my water bottle popped open in my bag and spilled all over it. With a Kindle, either through the formal lending function or just giving a friend I trust my Amazon login information (I have trusted exactly two people with this), I can lend out a book without having to worry that my $40 hardcover might get destroyed.
• Price. $10-12 for a new release book instead of a $35-40 for a hardcover? Yes, please.
• Syncing. Sometimes I forget a book, my Kindle or my iPad. But I always have my iPhone with me, which means I can pick up exactly where I left off in a book. It’s something that, when I got the Kindle, I didn’t think twice about, but quickly came to appreciate as one of my favourite features.

I like physical books. I like the feel and the smell of them. I like the feeling of being surrounded by them, and I’ll never stop owning or buying them. However, just like I still like vinyl albums, floppy comic books and physically owning video games, CDs and DVDs/BDs, it’s hard not to admit that digital books have made a few things easier.

And it’s no different with digital comics. As much as I love holding a comic, I can’t drag my copy of Absolute DC: The New Frontier around just like I can’t drag around my 700-page copy of The Clinton Tapes. However, a $6 copy of the series lives on my iPad along with Casanova, Runaways #1-18 and a hundred other comics I’ve bought. They don’t sell comics at the airport but they do have free wifi. It makes some things just plain simpler. But just like a good bookstore will still get my money, so will a good comic book shop.

Borders’ bankruptcy is absogoddamnlutely a warning. It’s just not the one a lot of critics would make it out to be.