I’ve heard very little about the Borders Kobo e-reader, probably because I was a fairly early adopter of the Kindle (with my school library having purchased a first-generation Kindle, and my school providing me with a Kindle DX) and also because of the role the iPad has taken at my school. We do shop at our local Borders Express, where the clerks offer us a very welcome educator’s discount for our home-school shopping sprees. I’ve known that Borders has been on the brink for a while, and I have complex feelings about this news.
“I think that there will be a 50% reduction in bricks-and-mortar shelf space for books within five years, and 90% within 10 years,” says Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of Idea Logical Co., a New York consulting firm. “Book stores are going away.”
In towns and cities across America, consumers will soon have fewer places to discover new books. “I know that there is a lot of buying online, but I like crawling through the stacks and holding a book in my hands,” says Jim Nottingham, a business development consultant who lives in Millwood, N.Y., and shops at the Borders store in nearby Mount Kisco. “I feel like Lemony Snicket in ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events.”‘
