Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The Wiki Man | 27 February 2010

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

It takes a more ruthless person than me to walk past any of the defunct branches of Borders without feeling some pangs of conscience. I am sure the chain made some mistakes (it had a strange habit of opening vast, hangar-like stores in out-of-town retail parks such as Lakeside, places not generally known for their wide-ranging literary tastes), but its shops were usually well stocked and staffed. No, it is people like me who are responsible for this bankruptcy, our every Amazon visit a further nail in the coffin of the traditional bookseller. How long before the proper bookshop becomes as rare on our streets as the traditional tobacconist?

I would feel a little less guilty about the part I played in Borders’s demise if I thought their high-street properties would be used for something useful. But they will probably re-emerge as yet more shops selling women’s clothes or shoes, making our town centres even more monotonous than they are now. (If environmentalists are serious about tackling waste and over-consumption, they could usefully start by asking why women need 15 times as many shops to clothe themselves as men do.)

So, if our high streets are to be any more interesting than a random array of women’s clothing chains interspersed with coffee shops, what can be done? One solution might lie in technology such as the Espresso Book Machine, film footage of which can be seen online at http://twurl.nl/6hpoyw.

If you have stayed at a hotel which offers you facsimile editions of the world’s newspapers, you have already experienced printing on demand — the Espresso Book Machine simply takes this approach and applies it to the production of books instead of newspapers.

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