Does Borders Bankruptcy Signify the End of Physical Bookstores?
Kobo was just one of the e-reading devices that Borders chose to sell to its customers, instead of developing a single, proprietary device such as Barnes & Noble's Nook or Amazon's Kindle.
"... The shift is more toward online to the e-readers and the digital content," says Peter Wahlstrom, retail analyst, Morningstar Equity Research. "That's something that Barnes & Noble was relatively quick to embrace, and they built out their Nook platform, their own e-reader software platform and their own online digital locker, so to speak, where they could [store] customers' information and their purchases. So their customers have a reason to go back to Barnes & Noble. Amazon did the same thing with Kindle, and Apple certainly with the iTunes Store and the iPad as well. Borders was left as a distant third-, if not fourth-tier player and [was] really kind of late to the game for what is arguably one of the last remaining growth areas of the book-selling business."