Farewell, Borders bookstores.....

Another nail has been driven into the coffin of bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Borders bookstores is, as a chain, going out of business, which will throw another 10,000 people out of work on top of the 9,000 who lost their jobs when Space Shuttle Atlantis landed the other day. No wonder unemployment claims are up. Between NASA and Borders, you're looking at nearly 20,000 people who are going to be jobless in an already tight job market where nobody is hiring. Doesn't help that corporations are sitting on top of trillions of dollars that they not using to expand and hire people. I feel bad for the people who have invested a lifetime in the Borders bookstore business, employees who have worked there for years and made careers of it. Now they are out of work and joining the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed who will be looking for nonexistent jobs. NASA shuttle engineers at least have some shot at finding work if they can find any firms looking for people with their skills, but bookstore workers are going to have a tough time finding work in this economy. Libraries aren't hiring, either, so that's not a line of work open to them, unfortunately. Bricks-and-mortar bookstores are disappearing from our landscape as more and more people download stuff from the 'net, but not everyone's got access to high speed internet or a computer, so that leaves an entire segment of our society without a place to go for regular paper books. I personally do not have an e-reader, nor do I intend to buy one. I much prefer to hold a book in my hands that I can read, browse through and smell the paper and binding. I'm old school when it comes to such things. Sure, I've graduated to putting most of my music on to my iPod because I can carry around tons and tons of CDs on a tiny portable device and maybe one of these days I will come to the point where hauling around mulitple heavy hardback and softback books will get old and I will find it easier to download my books on to an e-reader, but for now, I always liked being able to visit my local Borders store and browse through titles and sit down on a comfy chair and read through books I might consider buying. I was always able to find stuff there that was obscure and harder to find at a standard local mom 'n' pop bookstore. But perhaps the demise of the super big box bookstore will return small family owned bookstores to downtowns since desperate readers like me are going to be hard pressed to find someplace to go book shopping. We've already lost some wonderful small local bookstores over the years to the big box retailers and locally here, all we have is a used bookstore and no bookstores where you can buy new titles. We lost a long standing local bookstore, DuBois, recently, to the changes in book retailing, and Heartland Books, which was a fantastic bookstore that used to inhabit downtown Kent, closed due to the owner no longer wanting to run it, so now all we have left is a used bookstore and nothing where one can buy new titles. That was where Borders was good. If I wanted a brand new book, I could go there and get it, and our local store was in Cuyahoga Falls, not far from here. Now I will have to drive to the Barnes and Noble store out in overcrowded Montrose in west Akron. The traffic there is nightmarish and I do my utmost to avoid that area. Too many big box retailers crammed into a fairly small area and roads indequate to meet the crunch of traffic there. So I guess I will have to shop online, which is easier anyway since I do not have to leave my house or use up gas driving someplace. I suspect the demise of so many stores is going to force more and more of us to do that, which will be good for the environment, I suppose. I'm just so going to miss stepping into my local Borders store and disappearing among all the books and discovering authors and titles I had never heard of. Goodbye, Borders, it was a great run. You will be sorely missed......