Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Borders

Christopher Caldwell mourns Borders' demise in The FT [irritating registration required]. He focuses more on its core book business, but his analysis applies to the CD department, too:

The forces that crippled it are the same ones that killed Tower Records, with the lag accounted for by the surprising fact that music wound up being easier than literature to digitise to customers’ satisfaction. Borders’ rise was computer-based: it was the first bookstore to carry out the digital revolution in inventorying. It could display more books because its software kept precise track of what was selling and how fast. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Borders’ inventorying turned out to be relatively simple to duplicate. Walmart and Target, not to mention Amazon.com, were soon able to match and beat its prices. Tax policies that favoured virtual enterprises over physical ones hurt, too.