Borders turns page to Chapter 11

(12:55 p.m. Over on The Buzz, Elizabeth Flock posted details about the Washington-area stores due to close. The list includes the Borders I used to shop at most often, 1801 K Street, as well as locations in Friendship Heights, White Flint, Bowie, Largo, Tysons Corner and Stafford.)
In its filing (PDF), Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders Group Inc. listed assets of $1.275 billion and liabilities of $1.293 billion, as of Dec. 25. It has 642 stores in the U.S. and employs about 18,000 people, including full-time, part-time and on-call workers.
The news shouldn't exactly be a surprise. Borders has spent years struggling with its digital strategy, as Fierce Content Management's Ron Miller noted this morning.
Its worst mistake may have been its decision to opt out of online sales: Borders outsourced Web retail to Amazon from 2001 to 2007--then didn't open its own Internet store until May, 2008. More recently, it opted for an all-of-the-above e-books strategy, in which it sold an assortment of third-party e-reader devices instead of developing one of its own.
I'm tempted to compare Borders with another analog-media retail chain fallen on hard times--Blockbuster, which filed for Chapter 11 last year. But while Blockbuster was the video-rental chain a lot of people loved to hate, many readers seemed to like Borders.
I'm afraid the more relevant parallel will be with another bookseller that got run over by the Internet: the District's late, great Olsson's.
What's your forecast for Borders? Will you miss it if it's gone?

　「『ボーダー』が消えてしまったら、寂しくなりますか？」
　本屋がなくなったら寂しいよ〜＞＜