Argh, Andrew H. beat me to the punch. At any rate...
Quote:
Originally Posted by jocampo
They were having issues before but failed to enter into the ebook market on time.
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Yes. $600 million worth of issues.
And really, how much faster could they have gotten into it? B&N, which had a string of profitable years and thus greater resources, only started shipping in November 2009; Borders was only about 6-8 months behind.
Let's face it, ebooks were the red-headed stepchild of the book biz until the iPad came out. The idea that Borders should have spent millions building a device and an ebook store in 2007, when they were already losing money -- well, that's just not realistic.
It's also not their method. For years, Borders used Amazon as a back-end for their online book sales; they only launched their own website in... 2007? 2008? They did the same with ebooks, partnering with Kobo instad of rolling their own.
And numerically, I don't see how an earlier entry would have helped. In 2006 -- their last profitable year -- they made $100m in profits off of $4
billion in revenues. They're down to $2.8 billion in revenues now; and I really don't see how a new ebook venture, competing against Amazon and Apple and B&N and Sony and everyone else, was going to capture nearly enough revenue to reverse that slide.
While I fully agree that
moving forward book chains are unlikely to survive without an ebook strategy, I see no compelling arguments that Borders would have avoided bankruptcy if they got into ebooks earlier.