Any hope that Borders would find a buyer and keep its nearly four hundred American stores open for business ended on Monday when the bookseller chain announced that it would liquidate its assets in an effort to pay creditors.
Sadly, a stream of mainly promotional book tweets ("A Prisoner of Birth is No 1 on the Fnac ebook best-selling list (Fnac being the major bookseller chain in France), before Guillaume Musso!") has not set the world alight.
By Ian Crouch July 19 , 2011Any hope that Borders would find a buyer and keep its nearly four hundred American stores open for business ended on Monday when the bookseller chain announced that it would liquidate its assets in an effort to pay creditors.
HMV which also owns the bookseller chain Waterstone's rejected Permira's original 190 pence $2.266) per share indicative bid in February, saying the offer undervalued the company, and refused to enter into any discussions with the suitor, which takes its name from the Latin for "very surprising, very different".
Concerned with the persistent competition from online booksellers and chain stores, the Strand recently hired a design company to advise them as to "what customers want now and in the future," Eddie Sutton, the store's manager, who has been there since 1991, said.
Cracking down on Apple and the publishers (all of whom settled with the D.O.J. instead of going to trial) works in the interests of Amazon, which is the true giant of both digital and print bookselling — viewed unkindly by brick-and-mortar booksellers, both big chains and cozy indie shops, and publishers, both major and minor.
Both booksellers own other chains that are based largely in shopping malls.
Borders, the chain bookseller, has suffered from declining sales and a dismal earnings report in early December sent alarm through the industry.
A self-published author has spoken out against Waterstones after a bookseller at the chain store posted pseudonymous, malicious reviews of his novel on Amazon.
