A litter after midnight, on Labor Day, I received an email from Borders announcing the last ten days of its existence were upon us. So I stopped in the one in the DC suburb of Columbia, Maryland that day while my better half visited a Jo-Ann’s Fabrics next door.

Lord, it was a sad sight. The cafe was closed in order to sell off the espresso machines and the like. A crowd of folks (little different from myself, of course) gathered to munch on the chain’s price reduced corpse.

For $22 I picked up John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Charles Wright’s Sestets, and Claude Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, and Elizabeth Moon’s Victory Conditions (I’d never heard of the book or the author, but it is clearly some kind of  space opera in the classic style of the Lensman or Lucky Starr).  Oh, and a book I bought for a Christmas present for one of the few people who read this blog.

Even Amazon should be a little saddened. After all, how many people have (and I don’t condone this) walked into a Borders or a Barnes & Noble or an independent bookstore, browsed through the selections to find something they liked, and then gone home and ordered it on Amazon.

Hell, Amazon should be subsidizing brick and mortar bookstores.

Publishers, too. After all, word of mouth from dedicated bookstore employees and shoppers is cheaper than paid advertising to promote a new book.

Of course, Amazon can afford to do a little subsidizing whereas the contemporary publishing industry really can’t. Not that I expect Amazon to do anything to roll back or at least hold back the bookstore apocalypse they were the cause of.