A2: Borders

Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes writes about the downfall of Borders, the Ann Arbor-based bookstore chain that announced on Monday its plans to shut down. ”The coming liquidation of the Borders brothers’ creation is more than another spasm of Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction.’ An icon in a town that worships icons will disappear from the corner of Liberty and State. Yet another Michigan company will go the way of so many other familiar names – Upjohn and Crowley Milner, Handleman and Gerber – gobbled up in a corporate sweepstakes that seldom works in the Big Mitten’s favor. And we get another piece of discomfiting evidence that the era launched by Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440 is endangered by the accelerating digitalization of information.” [Source]