Borders will be closing at least 200 Waldenbooks stores, putting 1,500 (mostly part-time) employees out of work. There will only be a little over a hundred Waldenbooks stores left after the cuts take effect in January.

According to their list, Borders will be closing two Waldenbooks in Washington state, at Bellis Fair in Bellingham and at the Spokane Valley Mall in Spokane. The Borders employees who post at I Work at Borders have more information posted and lots of sad comments.

After closing 35 to 40 B. Dalton stores annually for years now, Barnes & Noble is preparing to shutter the last remaining group of 50 Dalton outlets.

There's got to be a bookstore model that works, doesn't there?

There is a rumor buzzing around small business owners on Capitol Hill, and the rumors are remarkably similar: They say that literary institution Elliott Bay Book Company is going to close its Pioneer Square store and move to Capitol Hill, specifically to 10th Ave, between Pike and Pine, right next to Oddfellow's Hall. Because we are all sick of crappy phone photos, here is the Google Street View of the building:

View Larger Map

I called Mike Oaksmith, Managing Partner of Hunters Capital LLC, the business that owns the property. Oaksmith only said "I cannot confirm nor deny" those rumors, and suggested that I talk to Peter Aaron, the owner of Elliott Bay Book Company. "He would have the best insight," Oaksmith said. Aaron is currently traveling and is unavailable for comment. An e-mail sent to Elliott Bay manager Tracy Taylor yesterday has gone unanswered.

So let's take a flight of fancy for a moment and pretend these rumors are true: This would be a great thing for Elliott Bay Book Company. Seattle traditionalists may grumble that Elliott Bay's current location, with the creaky floors and Pioneer Square charm, makes the bookstore. But let's be honest: It's a chore to go to Pioneer Square nowadays, and the parking has always been a problem. Things are only going to get worse once the Viaduct comes down (or, God forbid, gets retrofitted). If Elliott Bay can become a neighborhood bookstore, part of a real neighborhood where people spend their days and their nights, there's a very good chance that it will thrive and find a new life.

I'll keep you posted as soon as I hear something new.

Google has announced Google Editions, an online database of DRM-free e-books that will not be tied to one website or e-reading device.

The new e-book store will launch sometime during the first half of 2010, and will have about 500,000 titles at launch. Under Google's payment scheme, publishers will receive about 63 percent of the gross sales, and Google will keep the remaining 37 percent.

Google also hopes to offer Editions titles through other online book retailers. In this scenario, online retailers would get 55 percent of revenues minus a small fee paid to Google, and publishers would get 45 percent.

If I ran an independent bookstore, I would be spending a lot of my time right now figuring out how to sell these books from my website. While it's true that no tiny bookstore is going to compete with Amazon, Google Editions would make it much easier for a small bookstore to say "We don't have that book physically in stock, but we do have the e-book, and you could buy that right now." It would at least partially alleviate some of the problems of running a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

The L.A. Times has a story about Vroman's Books, a Pasadena bookstore that is the new owner of the great Los Angeles bookstore Book Soup:

Allison Hills, president of Vroman's, said the company intended to keep Goldman's legacy alive by preserving the name and direction that made the store famous.

"The hope is that the transition is invisible to customers," Hills said. "Book Soup will continue. Vroman's will just provide the behind-the-scenes, operational infrastructure to keep it going.

The most troubling news is buried a little deeper:

In August, Chicago accounting firm Grant Thornton predicted that 400 bookstores would close by the end of this year, a 500% increase over the number that closed last year.

In comparison, Seattle's independent bookstores have gotten by relatively unscathed so far—we've lost Epilogue Books but even The Couth Buzzard, which closed a while back, is reopening—and let's hope we can make it through 2010 without any more closures.

Back in May, I wrote about Seattle University's independent bookstore and how the SU administration was considering turning over the bookstore to chain booksellers:

A list of bookstore-outsourcing facts prepared by SU staffers that was given to The Stranger claims lease operators usually keep their average payroll at about 8 percent of total expenses. The SU Bookstore estimates that if the corporate averages were applied to their store, four full-time positions would be lost. And lease operators do not allow for work-study positions, while SU Bookstore provides $100,000 annually in work-study and financial-aid assistance.

The Seattle University Spectator just ran a story about the outsourcing, and it turns out that things are progressing slowly:

The university hired consultants from Campus Bookstore Consulting, a Massachusetts-based firm that specializes in college bookstore analysis. These consultants have been around the university for the last several months examining book prices, customer service and general profitability. CBC will also be conducting focus groups Oct. 6 and 7 with faculty and students.

“Everyone has an opinion as to whether the bookstore is doing a good job or a bad job,” said Ron Smith, vice president of Finance. “The committee thought it would be prudent to have an outside view—someone who doesn’t have anything to gain one way or the other.”

So it sounds like SU is getting closer to a decision. CBC doesn't always side with the big boys: They recently encouraged Lewis & Clark College in Portland to drop Barnes & Noble and run their bookstore on their own. If the figures at the SU Bookstore hold up—they're currently doing twice the profitability of most college bookstores—they could very well stay independent.

May I suggest you look for this book or this book?

And here, via the Comics Curmudgeon, is a comic strip panel that is completely unrelated to Fantagraphics: