Borders' Decomposing Carcass

My wife and I went to Borders on University Avenue in Palo Alto yesterday to pick over the remaining carcass for book deals -- up to 90% off and EVERYTHING MUST GO!!!?!?!?!$*&!

The upstairs area was no longer accessible; in fact, I'd say only about 25% of shelves still had stuff on them. They were grouped by genre but in no real sensible order. Yes, that means Sarah Palin stood side by side with Barack Obama, and both had a whopping 90% Off sticker on them.

Picking through the various fiction sub-genres, two things dawned on me:

1) Man, there are a shit-ton of books out there. Books with catchy titles, sensible covers, phrases like "From the author of..." on them -- all now available for $1-2 on clearance. There are so many books, in fact, that for anyone who has the ambition of publishing, you can't help but wonder "How many of these are good?" and "How many of these are successful?" Part of me wanted to experiment and just pick one at random, then do a little research to get a sense of if/when it was successful, what kind of online presence the author had, etc.

2) It seemed like about half of the general fiction and YA books involved vampires of some sort, with a few zombie stragglers left about. Since this is a clearance sale, I'm guessing that this is a combination of overstock and stuff people didn't want. Since I'd stayed away from physical bookstores for years, perhaps I didn't quite understand how oversaturated the vampire genre was. I mean, it was seriously ridiculous, and it reminds me of a line from Bit Of A Blur, the autobiography of Blur bassist Alex James -- (paraphrasing) Britpop was two or three good bands and a bunch of mediocre bands ripping them off.

The vampire genre seemed to have been like that, and perhaps I didn't realize the extent of this because I'd ignored it. Part of me is still a "People thought I was weird for reading Anne Rice in high school" snob about it, but the more sensible part of me understands that big corporations jump on trends like there's no tomorrow. It's smart business -- catch the wave on the rise with some inexpensive product and some of it will be a hit.

(Aside on vampires: I'd resisted HBO's True Blood for years because of my "I only like Anne Rice and Bram Stoker vampires" snobbery, but that show/book series has created such an interesting twist with "mainstream" vampires that the universe fascinates me. BBC's Being Human (and its SyFy counterpart) are like this too thanks to a very interesting premise. Just being a vampire ain't enough anymore.)

I suppose in way, the trip was encouraging and discouraging at the same time. I'd forgotten how wonderful it can be to be in a bookstore, to just enjoy browsing (despite the complete chaos of the store). It gave me a sense of "We can do this!"; at the same time, the sheer volume of unwanted books also made me take a step back and go "Holy poop!"