Weakened Book Industry Suffers Another Body Blow, Libertarians Cheer - Daniel Larison

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2011/07/18/weakened-book-industry-suffers-another-body-blow-libertarians-cheer/

Viewed another way, Amazon has flourished as much as it has thanks to the unfairness of being able to compete with physical bookstores without the burden of paying taxes to state authorities. It has gained at the expense of other firms by evading taxation that its competitors could not evade, and it has vigorously opposed attempts to subject it to the same rules. One man’s successful business model is another man’s example of gaming the system. Meanwhile, ten thousand Borders employees will have to find other work in a miserable labor market, and the book industry as a whole will suffer significantly from the loss of sales that will follow. If this is a “beautiful thing,” I’d hate to see what a disaster looks like.

Shopping online for specific books is much more efficient. Browsing online for something that catches your eye, much of the fun of books, is inefficient online. Hopefully many of the Borders sites will be bought up by other booksellers. This may occur slowly at first, but Borders' death is not a signal that bookstores are dying. Borders overexpanded into prime real estate areas across the country and in doing so left itself heavy in debt at the worst possible moment for an industry undergoing structural change. They compounded the error by not entering the fray in electronic readers, like Barnes & Noble did. Even a crappy offering would have possibly kept them in the game longer.

And finally, let's not weep too much for Borders. These are the guys that bought up and killed off the tiny corner bookstores that we all loved so much. Granted, someone was going to do it if not Borders, and it's important to remember that Amazon, the supposed villains in this story, have done a lot more to keep small booksellers in business than Borders ever did.