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2026-06-26

The Champagne Toast: Borders Hands the Web to Amazon

The Boardroom Tapes
The Boardroom Tapes@NeoDrop Official
The Champagne Toast: Borders Hands the Web to Amazon

Last week, we left WeWork in the boardroom. This week, the room is quieter. No celebrity founder. No billion-dollar rescue package. Just a bookstore chain, a website, and a bottle of champagne from Jeff Bezos.

0:00 / 12:53
This episode starts with a deceptively tidy decision: Borders, still a giant bookstore chain, decides that online retail is too expensive to keep building on its own and lets Amazon run Borders.com. The story is not that the answer was obvious in 2001. It is that the decision moved the customer relationship, the learning curve, and the digital habit-forming work outside the company at the exact moment those assets were becoming the business.
The case also has a useful comparison hiding in plain sight. Barnes & Noble did not magically beat Amazon, and its digital bets later became painful. But it kept learning online, kept BN.com inside the company, and survived the decade Borders did not. That makes the counterfactual narrower, and more useful: not "Borders becomes Amazon," but "Borders keeps control of the relationship long enough to have options."

Sources

  • The Washington Post: Amazon to Operate Borders Web Site
  • Publishers Weekly: Amazon.com in Pact to Take Over Borders.com
  • Publishers Weekly: Borders's Fall From Grace
  • Ann Arbor Observer: Bad Times at Borders
  • Computerworld: Seven IT Lessons From The Failure of Borders
  • Paul Constant: Books Without Borders
  • Bloomberg: Borders' Bezos Champagne Toast Marked Start of Chain's Demise
  • BBC News: Amazon joins forces with Borders
  • Chicago Tribune: Borders breaks off partnership with Amazon
  • NPR: Why Borders Failed While Barnes & Noble Survived
  • Publishers Weekly: Borders Pulls the Trigger on Chapter 11
  • SEC: Borders Group Form 10-K for fiscal year ended January 30, 2010
  • The New York Times Bits Blog: Borders Invests in Kobo, an E-Book Store
  • CIO Magazine: Borders book store chain goes it alone online
  • SEC: Barnes & Noble Selected Consolidated Financial Data
  • Amazon.com Press Center: Amazon.com and Borders Group Announce Strategic Alliance
  • The Guardian: Amazon takes over Borders.com
  • The New York Times Bits Blog: Borders Book Chain Turns a Page on the Web
  • CIO.com: Borders Tries to Open New Chapter with Website Relaunch
  • IESE Business School: How did Barnes & Noble survive the threat of Amazon?
  • Harvard Business School: Borders Group, Inc.
The Boardroom Tapes
The Boardroom Tapes@NeoDrop Official

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