Which borders books are closing

And Kobo officials said users of Borders e-book accounts, which began transitioning to Kobo in June, will be able to access their e-books uninterrupted. The loss of Borders stores will also deal a blow to U. Borders' move to close stores while it reorganized in bankruptcy protection already increased the collective vacancy rate of shopping centers that contained a Borders to 9. Macke calculated the liquidation of the rest of the chain could increase the vacancy rate on that same basis to Borders stores average about 25, square feet 2, square meters , about half the size of a football field.

But perhaps the biggest impact of Borders going out of business will be to the consumer. Asia Lyons, 32, was at a loss Monday when she learned she would have to find somewhere new to shop for books.

The New Yorker, a manager at Starbucks, buys 50 to books a year for her and her daughter and usually buys them at the Borders near Penn Station. It has been a long fall for Borders since Tom and Louis Borders opened their first store in , selling used books in Ann Arbor. At its start, the brothers were mostly interested in offering other bookstores a system they developed for managing inventory.

At the time, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton mall chains, with small stores and 20, to 50, titles, were growing rapidly. Borders' last ditch attempt to compete in the e-reading world, the Kobo , never caught on with readers. Borders' proposal needs to be approved by the bankruptcy court, but that's really just a formality.

And while it's odd to say that its sad to see a giant chain store go out of business, but in this case, it's true -- even if it opens up the possibility that the only physical bookstores likely to remain in any number in the States are small independents. Ryan, a former writer for Wired's Epicenter blog, is the editor of the Threat Level blog. When the recession hit in , Borders was already carrying a huge debt load. But Borders could never get out of the hole that its inefficient business practices had put itself in.

Borders was a bookstore, but over the years it morphed into a multipurpose entertainment retailer. In the s, it invested heavily in CD sales. Bad move: Around then, people stopped buying CDs as they began buying iPods instead. And when it finally reduced music inventories, Borders found itself with more expensive retail space than it needed, putting additional pressure on its business model.