Comments on Bordering on Awkward

I actually enjoyed the one with Ira Glass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMO0C3Ojd2E

Zune?

Wow, blast from the past.

I keep knocking over sk8rbois wearing those ... NOT!

fucking shit, could they get any more boring people? Wes Anderson boring? THATS A SHOCKER! IRA FUCKING GLASS!?!?!

I used to say that I love Jason Schwartzman so much that I'd pay to watch him read the phone book. After watching three minutes of that video, I still love him, just not so unconditionally.

I went to that Borders the day Weisfeld Southcenter reopened and I thought it was a really nice store. Lots of different areas to mill about in and eye the scenery. Yes, call me old fashioned, but I still live some of my life in 3-D.

Are Schwartzman and Anderson that hard up for cash?

Bordering on Awkward

A found poem by Paul Constant

The future for Borders is about five years ago
Over the course of the media tour, the reporter from Kent falls in love,
Borders has been cornering the awkward market this year.

Obviously, Mr. Constant doesn't have Bethany Jean Clement's innate talent for inserting decent poetry in virtually everything she writes, but compared with the utterly unpoetical, and frankly disappointing bolded text found in such places as In the Hall or Savage Love or My Philosophy, Bordering on Awkward is an example of a budding talent worth keeping an eye on. We shall be hoping for great things to spring, unconsciously, from this young man's keyboard.

No Ipod, no Zune, no customers. Kiosks? Kiosks suck ass. The only way they won't all be broken in six months is if they're so unpopular no one touches them.

If they could figure out how to dock users' Ipods and Kindles and etc. etc. without (a) destroying the devices and (b) requiring a trillion man-hours of customer support, maybe this would work. But what they should do instead is just have wireless, and let people connect their own computers that way, and download content to them, and keep their support issues to themselves -- but wait, that's just the internet. They could do that from home.

Or, to keep that reporter from Kent happy, they could hand out old Sony Walkman tape players and Books on Tape.

Didn't Starbucks try a similar thing a while back. I remember even back then it was like, um, I can do this from home.

Borders has also 'relaunched' their website. It's no longer a wrapper on top of Amazon, and so the prices have gone way, way up. I had $17.00 on a Borders gift card and a $5 coupon, but any of the books I actually wanted were $10-$25 more than they were on Amazon. Apparently they're targeting the website at old, clueless people too.

Paul, I'm confused. Can the MP3s only be played using music players that support some kind of DRM that iPod and Zune players *don't* have? iPods and Zunes (and a million other players) can handle MP3s. There are protected AACs (Apple FairPlay) and protected Windows Media (what was PlaysForSure), and some kind of Zune protected format.

@10 - Technically speaking, their prices didn't go up. The discounts went down. The price of a book is the price of the book.

This may seem a bit pedantic, but from such trivial miscomprehensions are a nation of clueless idiot buyers born. (Not calling you one of those, mind - just sayin'.)

@12, not really. The price of the book printed on the jacket is a fantasy. The price you PAY is the real price. Just because retailer X calls it a "discount" doesn't mean anything. If you pay more at Borders than you do at Amazon or BN, your wallet will be unimpressed by the "it's really a discount" argument.

@13 - And there would be one of the aforementioned idiot buyers chiming in.

Or to put it another way : bullshit. That price on the book is what's being utilized on the way down (and through) the wholesaler and retail pikes. If you like to treat your wallet to fantasies about how the world works, that's your business. Or cluelessness, take your pick. But it's not how the world actually works.

I am in love with you, Paul Constant.

I loved the Beach Boys YEARS before it was even sorta cool. And Pet Sounds is the best album Brian Wilson ever did, Sunflower is okay but not that great.

BTW, what the fuck was the point of this video again?