Borders doesn’t care if you buy books online from them or not, apparently.
originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]
[note: the subject line is my opinion, but c’mon guys, April?]
Ann Arbor, MI, is a lovely place, I’m sure. The 7th largest city in Michigan, Ann Arbor is home to 120,000 people (give or take) making it one of the many small cities that — more than New York or LA — make up the urban and suburban landscape of the US; the places we grew up in, the college towns where we first stepped out on our own, the places some of us still live and work in. Ordinary, quiet — boring — small cities; for publishers and booksellers, this is the core market. The editors and critics live in city centres, but the market lives in suburbs and places like Peoria.
The Ann Arbor News is a lovely paper too, I’m sure. As the local paper-of-record serving Washtenaw and Livingston counties, they’ve been keeping the residents there up-to-date on all the news for almost 175 years. They have offices in Ann Arbor, Brighton, and Ypsilanti. (Ypsilanti is not only fun to say out loud, it is surprisingly fun to type.)
I wanted to start out by saying I really have nothing against Ann Arbor or its local fish-wrap — because I’m about to ridicule it mercilessly (if only in passing, as the city is not my primary target):
I found a great article about the new Borders concept store, which also mentions (as part of the new corporate strategy) the efforts the company is putting into their new online sales site. A lot of numbers are there, and quotes from both a Borders spokeswoman and an independent business analyst. Among other facts revealed in the article is that Borders plans to launch the new Borders.com sometime “before April.” Other sources say Borders will go live with the site “sometime in Q1 2008″; while accurate, that’s not so helpful.
That’s the closest I’ve seen to an announced date. I’m not sure what the hold-up is — personally, I would have launched the site the first day I legally could. But hey, that’s me — and as might be obvious, I’m not running a half-billion dollar business. (Borders.com still loads up an Amazon co-branded site, as of this posting.) [edit 18 Dec 08: The Borders.com site emerged from beta and went “live” on May 31]
The point I’m going to make, though, is that this in-depth article on the future of Borders wasn’t published in BusinessWeek or carried by the AP or Reuters over the newswires. It ran in the Ann Arbor News. If you count UM students, that’s maybe 150,000 eyeballs– or a skosh more if other folks in metro Detroit read the article on the M-live web site.
Among other things, Ann Arbor is home to the world HQ of Borders Book Group: is a write-up in the local paper the best you can do, Borders?
(The Ann Arbor News may become my go-to source for anything Borders, tho: Check out this article from yesterday, with photos of the new store and an embedded video of Borders CEO George Jones himself introducing the new store concept.) [edit: no longer embedded but a similar video is available on YouTube, as is a CNBC interview with George Jones] [& note: not that George Jones, but maybe if we bought him the trademark sunglasses…]
Aside from the value in a general-publishing-and-retail-sales respect, this latest news is only of note because I was going to use data from a post-beta Borders sales site as a cornerstone of the manga online Top 100. I won’t delay the rankings for another 6 weeks (or more) but this means I need to rethink that approach at least in the short term, and introduces another week or so of delay.
That or I’m a lazy bastard and am grasping at any straw to excuse the extended hiatus. –whichever seems more probable to you.
