The Demise of Borders Group and the Challenge of Browsing

Borders group, whose large, cafe-equipped bookstores have become places to spend a few agreeable hours in the presence, if not the company, of fellow book lovers, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on 16 February. What we´d miss, we realized, was the browsing-the wandering amid the store´s shelves, surveying their contents, pausing to pick up and examine an intriguing title. We also realized that whereas browsing for books in a bricks-and-mortar store is a satisfying experience, its online equivalent is slow and tedious. Could used bookstores deploy the online browser? Yes, but they´d need an as-yet-uninvented piece of technology: software that can populate a virtual bookcase from video footage of a store´s inventory.