Despite my indie roots, Borders loss concerns me

As a long-time employee and devotee of indie bookshops, I view the closing of the Borders stores here with mixed feelings.

Borders, which started out as an Ann Arbor, Mich., indie, grew into a massive chain; one that arrived on the Milwaukee scene after Barnes & Noble brought the predatory chain mentality to town.

Folks may or may not recall that B&N targeted the Schwartz Bookshops when it arrived, opening just down from the Brookfield location and trying -- yet failing -- to open in the Fox Bay Theater, directly across the street from another Schwartz. I remember it well because I was there in the thick of it.

There was fear that Barnes and Noble would put Schwartz to the brink -- long before the local shops, founded in 1927, actually closed -- and that later, the huge new Borders shops would push it over the edge.

But that didn't happen. Owner David Schwartz was savvy enough to remind Milwaukee how much the shops his father founded and his mother helped run played a role in the community and even bolstered that role with the extremely successful Schwartz Gives Back program.

Folks shopping at Schwartz knew nearly every penny they spent was staying in Milwaukee in wages, rents, taxes and even profits, should there happen to be any with the slim margins of the deep discount era.

In the end, while Amazon and the chains weakened the structure of Schwartz they didn't shutter them, as was the case in many, many other cities.

Now, there are still indies -- including two that sprouted from the roots of Schwartz -- and they satisfy many area booklovers.

But the chains have their fans, too, and especially once Schwartz went away, they offer the only expansive, general interest bookshops in some parts of town. And while I'd prefer you spend your money at People's Books or Boswell Book Company or Next Chapter Bookshop or The Little Red Book or the other independents, I don't really want the chains to go away.

Anyone that knows me knows I love the smell of books, the feel of them, the look of them. And I love bookshops. I'm not ready for the ebook quite yet.

I'm not ready for books and reading to become an entirely solitary pursuit, conducted by mail, consumed alone, feeling only the warmth of the video display on my fingertips. How will my favorite author sign my ebook when I meet him, most likely at an indie?

When I last was in Chicago, I saw that the huge Borders across from the Water Tower was closing and that shocked me, even though I know it shouldn't have.

The loss of the three Borders shops concerns me even more in Milwaukee. This is especially true Downtown, where another huge retail space will now sit empty, with perhaps an abandoned chair or bookshelf -- a broom leaning there -- and maybe a discarded Random House carton across the room as the only reminder that once ideas were traded here.