My apologies to anyone who clicked the “More” link on my last post and ran into a whole bunch of super creepy links. I haven’t figured out how the hack worked, but it was indeed a hack. Ew. I probably need to upgrade my WordPress.
Folks have been blogging about the new Borders “concept stores,” which will feature Travel, Cooking, Wellness, Graphic Novels, and Children’s Books. I wonder if Children’s Books implies YA, too? Also, any time Borders is in the news, I think about the Borders of my Ann Arbor childhood. There was only one store. There was an era when smokers could smoke inside. I remember reading Delia Ephron’s Teenage Romance: Or How To Die Of Embarrassment sitting on one of the wooden benches upstairs, at a time when I thought, daily, that I might. Later, when the Borders I knew had morphed into “Store One” during their first period of serious corporate expansion, a whole bunch of my friends worked there, and going to Borders became as much about visiting them as it was about browsing for new books. Ann Arbor readers, have any of you been to the Concept Store? What did you think?
I work for Borders corporate now and my fiance is working at the concept store in the digital center.
I love the digital center (not just ’cause Billy works there, lol). I need to buy myself a non-iPod mp3 player so I can take advantage of their audiobook download center. The cooking destination is awesome as well; you can print out free recipes and watch cooking videos and awesome stuff like that.
The children’s center does not include YA, however. I was pretty disappointed by that. Billy had been telling me how they’re experimenting with book displays and trying to put more emphasis on face outs so I wandered over to the YA section and…all of the books were just crammed together, only the spines facing out on most of them. The only cool part was the display for “Twilight” – that had an attractive table set up with a cool red ribbon draped over and intertwined with different piles of books.
In short: the new stuff they’re doing is awesome. However I feel that in the rush to be new and awesome and different some of the non-cutting-edge parts got forgotten. Hopefully that will be fixed soon once the store is on its feet.
Angela
February 22, 2008 at 3:54 pmI work for Borders corporate now and my fiance is working at the concept store in the digital center.
I love the digital center (not just ’cause Billy works there, lol). I need to buy myself a non-iPod mp3 player so I can take advantage of their audiobook download center. The cooking destination is awesome as well; you can print out free recipes and watch cooking videos and awesome stuff like that.
The children’s center does not include YA, however. I was pretty disappointed by that. Billy had been telling me how they’re experimenting with book displays and trying to put more emphasis on face outs so I wandered over to the YA section and…all of the books were just crammed together, only the spines facing out on most of them. The only cool part was the display for “Twilight” – that had an attractive table set up with a cool red ribbon draped over and intertwined with different piles of books.
In short: the new stuff they’re doing is awesome. However I feel that in the rush to be new and awesome and different some of the non-cutting-edge parts got forgotten. Hopefully that will be fixed soon once the store is on its feet.
Sara
February 22, 2008 at 8:31 pmThanks for the inside scoop, Angela!
I need to make it back to Ann Arbor again one of these years…