COMMENTARY | The Borders bookstore chain will likely be offered up in a liquidation auction Tuesday -- and we're not happy campers.
If America's second-largest bookstore chain hits the skids, the 11,000 employees who work at Borders won't be happy either. American malls and shopping centers will have a fresh jolt of 400 new vacancies, standing out like pulled teeth among the phone kiosks and teen apparel outlets.
Without the Borders superstore situated an easy five minute ride down the highway, we'll have to travel 30 miles or so to get to the nearest sit-down book store.
Not likely we'll make daily or even monthly trips to buy books. But we visit the local Borders a couple of times a week. We like to hook-up our Wi-Fi phones or laptops and drink coffee.
It's easier to find page 289 in a book than it is on a Kindle, a Nook, or on the Toshiba Book Place.
It's nice too that there's only one way to turn the page -- with your fingers. It's nice to watch the reading or math tutors hunkering down in books with kids who need help.
We're surprised at the number of teens who go to Borders to root through the book racks. Some of the younger kids go there with their parents.
There's a fair number of minority kids, minority parents in the Borders bookstore. We take that as a positive sign of an emerging educated black or Hispanic middle class.
We've bought plenty of books from Amazon, and that's part of the problem.
Both my wife and I do plenty of reading on our electronic devices. But when you're reading for enlightenment and for relaxation, you can't beat the book.
When reading on a "device," you might start out reading about life in the American Colonial period and end up reading about where Casey Anthony is hiding, or that Justin Bieber crashed a wedding in Malibu, or rapper Ja Rule's prison sentence for tax evasion.
There are all those flashing lights, distracting you, a mental Las Vegas, when you'd rather be sitting with a book in a Japanese garden. Or a Borders.
Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer who has written for weekly and daily newspapers and several online publications. He is a frequent Yahoo contributor, concentrating in news and financial writing.
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