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Borders made the mistake of aggressively expanding into an economic collapse and a major shift in their industry's business model that they missed by a country mile. BN on the other hand went in aggressively renegotiating leases and consolidating acquisitions. BN was also caught off guard on the eBook surge, but they had the resources to burn to catch up. That doesn't mean that BN is out of the woods, but since Riggio came back, this past Quarter is showing that they may have steered out of the danger zone.
What this means for the B&M market, is that the market is dictating that only one national chain can exist followed by smaller regional players along with the smathering of regional used book stores like HPB. BN's leases are averaging 2-3 years left on most stores (compared to Borders 8 year average), which means that they should be able to close or reposition bad stores.
The biggest challenge to BN's B&M are the Superstores Target, WM and the dicsount club stores that all carry the hottest hard back books. eBooks show that they are cannibalizing paper back sales, so BN will have to find a way to reinforce it's hard back sales and other sales (toys and games). I can see BN merging the new and used book store models in the future just to keep the B&M thriving.
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