Borders, the chain that buried many local bookstores, will likely go bankrupt

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.”‘

via Borders Nearing Bankruptcy Filing – WSJ.com.