Quote:
Originally Posted by bhartman36
There will probably always be some market for paper books, but the question is: Is there enough of a market to sustain Borders? The answer -- at least preliminarily -- seems to be no. B&N is surviving because they've got the Nook, and Amazon diversified from just books long ago, so they're relatively safe (even if they didn't have the Kindle). But it's looking pretty bad for Borders. It might survive as a name of some kind of store, but how does it stay a paper bookstore after this point? The market for paper books isn't going up.
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I don't see evidence that it's an issue of the DTB market not being big enough to sustain them. They have competition and the competition beat them.
That is to say, even if there was a hugely growing paper book market, and B&N was opening stores left and right, Borders may still have this problem.
When the big Borders in my area closed, it had more to do, I think, with the equally big, but much nicer, B&N that opened directly across the road.
As someone above said, there was no reason to go to Borders compared to the alternatives.