Borders is burning

From the Mot­ley Fool and BrandWeek comes two updates on a favorite exam­ple of mine: Bor­ders. Ama­zon had been han­dling Border’s e-commerce and web store­front, until Bor­ders man­age­ment ended the agree­ment in early 2007. Now there’s reports that Bor­ders man­age­ment is con­sid­er­ing sell­ing part or all of the com­pany, after the com­pany sus­pended its stock div­i­den and took on addi­tional debt.

As both of the 2008 arti­cles point out, Bor­ders has plenty of com­pe­ti­tion. Ware­house stores sell best­sellers at steep dis­counts, and that keeps some poten­tial Bor­ders cus­tomers from mak­ing that extra trip. Barnes & Noble isn’t in great shape, but at least they’re competitive.

As I men­tioned on 24 March 2008, the book pub­lish­ing busi­ness is under­go­ing sig­nif­i­cant changes. So it’s not sur­pris­ing that book­stores are struggling.

Tagged as: Amazon, book, borders, business-model, debt, e-commerce, value-chain