Borders did not fail because Americans stopped reading. It failed for the same reason most chains fail, which is that the lease arithmetic stops working before the demand arithmetic does.

What is worth mourning, if anything is, is not the chain itself. It is the specific way in which a certain kind of suburban American teenager was, for two decades, given a place to spend three hours on a Saturday afternoon with a stack of books and no obligation to buy any of them. That place is now, for the most part, gone, and the internet — which has replaced many things and which is, in many respects, wonderful — has not replaced it.

This is an archival excerpt. The full piece runs to roughly four thousand words in the October 2011 print edition. — The Editors, 2026.