Back in the Dark Ages, when Shana and I were planning our wedding, we were often asked, “Where are you registered?”

We’re not really fancy-china-and-napery people, but we understood that registering for wedding gifts solved a practical problem for distant relatives and family friends.

Then we had a brainstorm: we’d register for books!

Nowadays, creating a “Gift List” on Amazon is a piece of cake. But this was a pretty radical idea for the mid-Nineties. To do it, we needed a bookstore with national reach, a deep selection, and a “can-do!” attitude.

In short, we needed Borders.

The other chain bookstores looked at us blankly when we told them what we wanted. Borders, on the other hand, a company born of the cafe book culture of a university town, said, “Interesting; that’s something we’d like to offer our customers.” Then they rolled up their sleeves, and, with just a few hiccups, helped us start our marriage with a groaning shelf of classics.

Fast forward to last week, when Borders Group, after years of lagging behind the other book chains, filed for bankruptcy protection.

What happened? How did the tiger of the Nineties become the white elephant of the…Tens?

While it’s true that Borders suffered from Starbucks-itis over the last decade – a grievous overexpansion both domestically and abroad — its larger problem was a failure to understand the shape-shifting nature of book-buying and consumption.

Take the Olshans, for example. We’re avid consumers of books, for both work and pleasure. In the course of writing a story – even a simple children’s story! – I’ll consume a stack of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and I’ll refer to bits and pieces of several more stacks.

These days, I can read many of those books for free by way of Google Books. For books I absolutely need to have on hand, there’s Amazon, where I don’t even need to buy new editions. Amazon has become the greatest used bookstore in the world through its online partnerships with booksellers.

But let’s say I need a book right away, faster than the free two-day delivery I’ve grown accustomed to with Amazon Prime. First, I’ll try my favorite local used bookstore. Then I’ll go to the library. And then – and only then – will I head over to a big chain bookstore, which usually won’t have what I’m looking for anyway.

Over the past five years, I visited the Borders in Camp Hill maybe half a dozen times. I did buy some books there, but, as often as not, I left the store with a list of books to buy on Amazon at a better price.

Unfortunately, Borders decided to compete with Barnes & Noble – and even Target, Wal-Mart, and Costco, where so many people buy books these days – on price alone. Walking into a Borders went from being like walking into a large, but hardly overwhelming local bookstore with an unbelievable selection, to walking into a mega-store like any other mega-store.

Worst of all, Borders missed the boat on the e-book revolution. While Amazon and Barnes & Noble worked feverishly to corner the market on digital readers, Borders sat back and contently sold everyone else’s devices.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not gloating. My own fortunes as an author are likely to suffer from the demise of so many miles of bookstore shelving. But there’s a part of me that celebrates the slaying of a corporate goliath that was responsible for putting so many independent booksellers out of business. In the years following our wedding, I watched the little guys fall, one by one, out-competed on price by the big chains.

I think the future of bookselling lies in two places: small, nimble, community-minded, carefully curated mom-and-pop stores; and the Internet.

There will surely come a time when all books – all artistic content, for that matter – is digitized and instantly downloadable. That will be a happy day in terms of the billions of barrel of oil that won’t have to be deployed to create and transport countless tons of books from a distant factory to your doorstep; but also a sad day for the communal aspect of book-browsing and buying.

The Enlightenment was built on the intellectual cross-pollination of cafes, back when coffee was a new technology. I wonder what’s being built in Google Groups and on blogs, as one by one, the reasons for venturing out into the real world are trumped by the power of the virtual.

Here’s hoping it’s all to the good.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 03 March 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com