Tag archive: Borders

Five months after filing for bankruptcy protection, the U.S.'s second-largest bookseller Borders will be liquidating its assets, closing all its stores, and letting go of its employees after the company was unable to reach a buyout deal with Book-of-the-Month Club owner Nafaji Cos. Instead, Borders' assets will be sold to a group of liquidators led by Hilco and Gordon Brothers. “We are saddened by this development,” said… Read More

Quora’s doing what it does best: Offering up thorough answers from insiders themselves. Today we noticed that former Borders director of merchandise planning and analysis, Mark Evans, had wandered by the site and graced us with an essay-length answer to a very important question: “Why is Barnes & Nobles performing well as a business while Borders has filed bankruptcy?” Borders, once the Starbucks of bookstores, filed for Chapter 11… Read More

The opening book of Swedish author Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, has become what industry experts believe is the first novel to sell more than a million copies in e-book form, The New York Times reports. News of the million mark milestone comes via Knopf books, which is a subsidiary of Random House publishing. Combined digital sales of the Millennium series, which also includes The Girl Who Played… Read More

Book retailer Borders has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and plans to close as many as 30 percent of its “underperforming” stores in the next several weeks—which adds up to about 200 retail locations. Borders says it has acquired over $500 million of “debtor-in-possession” financing led by GE Capital to help the company restructure its business into a viable long-term venture…but, in the… Read More

As the end-of-year holiday season approaches, competition in the ereader market continues to intensify: Borders has announced the Aluratek Libre eBook Reader Pro is now available for $99. The initial retail price for the Libre Pro was $169. Unlike Eink-based readers like the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, or Barnes & Noble Nook, the Libre relies on a 5-inch reflective light LCD screen technology that the company says looks like real paper… Read More

Giant bookseller Borders is finally flexing its muscles in the electronics books market: the company has just launched its own ebooks store to compete with the likes of Amazon.com, Sony, and Barnes & Noble…and eventually Google. And Borders isn't attacking the ebook market with a selection of electronic titles: the company is ready with a whole ecosystem, including dedicated electronic reader devices and apps for the iPhone,… Read More

The ereader marketplace continues to get more complicated: Kobo has announced that its EInk-based Kobo eReader is now available for pre-order through Borders.com for $149.99—and that units will ship in time to arrive for Father's Day, June 20. “At $149.99 the Kobo eReader is roughly $100 less than the other eReading devices out there, so it provides a great way to start eReading without breaking the bank,” said Kobo… Read More

The consumer electronics market is ablaze with ereaders and the promise of tablet computing, so Kobo's entry into the field at first blush doesn't seem all that noteworthy: the Kobo eReader is your basic 6-inch ereader tablet with a d-pad style paging button, 1 GB of onboard memory, and Bluetooth connectivity: no color, no Wi-Fi, no 3G, and high-speed synchronization has to happen via USB. But what might let Kobo give some of the… Read More

Borders Books just took a seat on the e-book store bandwagon, announcing that it too will be selling digital books in 2010. Unfortunately for Borders, no one really cared and Barnes & Noble had a good laugh. So Borders tried another announcement and did a little more name dropping this time—saying it will be partnering with

A few months ago, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. made headlines by announcing it was planning to start charging users to read online versions of the company's newspaper properties, by putting portions of its content behind so-called “paywalls” that could only be accessed by paid subscribers. Now, The Los Angeles Times reports that News Corp has been meeting with other news publishers with an eye towards forming a… Read More

Prior to the Olympics this summer, there was a furor when foreign journalists complained that the Chinese government was blocking ‘sensitive’ sites. In the spirit of the games, those were opened up. But now, after the outsiders have long gone, the government has re-blocked several of those sites, including the BBC Chinese site and Voice of America in Chinese, the BBC reports. According to a Chinese government spokesman, the… Read More

After losing heaps of money trying to run its own online bookstore, Borders essentially turned over its online store to Amazon.com. Links on the Borders bookstore turned users over to Amazon, and Borders got a commission on the sale. Borders might have been the second largest book retailer in the United States, but even it couldn't make money selling books online. Now, seven years later, Borders has decided to give e-commerce a second… Read More

China, North Korea, Burma…they’re places where protest has been crushed. But yesterday people demonstrated against Net censorship in virtual locations from those countries.  Organized by the group Reporters Without Borders, the first Online Free Expression Day invited people to create avatars and take part in demonstrations in virtuallocations where protest would not be allowed in the real world.   In a statement RWB said,… Read More

Reporters Without Frontiers have released their Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007, and it highlights not only the problems with press freedom for traditional journalists around the globe, but also the threat to bloggers.   A number of countries have seen their rankings fall because of the way they’ve restricted or violated the freedom of bloggers. Several countries, like Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Egypt, have arrested bloggers… Read More

There’s just a year to go before the next Olympics are held in China. That’s intended to shine as a beacon for the country. But, according to a new joint report by Reporters Without Borders and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, China has a long way to go in terms of online censorship and surveillance.   The report was compiled withthe help of someone working in the IT industry in China, who, for fairly obvious reasons, is kept… Read More