Will you be downloading your Christmas books this year? You might have to if you were planning to shop at Borders…
The high street bookseller is on the verge of entering administration, having filed court documents on Wednesday night for permission to appoint BDO Stoy Hayward as administrators, as Retail-Week.com reports. Borders’ website has stopped taking orders and its 1,000 staff across 45 stores must fear the worst.
This very closely echos the fate of music seller Zavvi, which ran the city centre chain formerly known as Virgin Megastores, and Woolworths, both of which collapsed into administration before Christmas last year. Both Woolies and Zavvi have since been resurrected as online-only brands. If a buyer doesn’t emerge for the chain, will there be a digital white knight to keep the Borders brand alive online?
Zavvi and Woolies now specialise in entertainment home delivery and under new owners have re-worked their entire businesses from physical to digital distribution: Zavvi promotes offers through content-led campaigns such as this top 100 films promotion in partnership with The Times.
If Borders is to become online only, it will have to treat its website not as a lacklustre online appendage to its stores with some community publishing and the occasional video, but a competitive e-commerce platform that offers a genuine alternative to the likes of Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Waterstones.com. That’s far easier said than done and if someone fancies the challenge they are going to have invest heavily to make it happen.
Borders has dabbled with e-readers — it launched the Elonex reader in June — and it offers some 45,000 digital titles online. But it’s far behind UK ebook leader Waterstones and so far no retailer could even consider basing a business on digital publishing alone, such is the sector’s slow growth here.
Alongside the traditional news and information publishing biz, the sale of physical content is another casualty of this recession and the unstoppable growth of online services.

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