Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg News
Staff members of The Times’s media news department are highlighting the most significant developments this year in the industries they cover.
Any fears that book publishers had about brick-and-mortar stores disappearing were confirmed by one cataclysmic event this summer: Borders went out of business. Painful as the news was, no one in the industry was shocked. The 40-year-old Borders had not made a profit in years, stopped paying its bills just after Christmas of last year, filed for bankruptcy in March and limped along until July, when it finally said it would liquidate. But the shock waves have reverberated throughout the industry ever since. Once the shelves at the remaining 400 Borders stores were dismantled (and sold, scrap by scrap, during going-out-of-business sales), publishers lost miles of space to display their books. And a no-longer-hypothetical question loomed: without bookstores, how would consumers figure out which books they wanted to read? Much of the Borders business has migrated to Barnes Noble and smaller bookstores, as well as online through Amazon.com. But publishers, who used to take the presence of brick-and-mortar stores for granted, are still figuring out how to prepare for a world with drastically fewer places to sell print books.
Earlier Media Moments
- Movies: Backing Down on Video on Demand
- TV: Comedy’s Comeback
- Music: Record Labels Still Carry a Big Price Tag
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=e732c7f9bc83e49a7eec6104d82c09ba