I guess they call it linkbait for a reason: I just can't stop thinking about this stupid Business Insider story by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry titled "Three Cheers For The Borders Liquidation!" It's full of so many lazy thoughts that I don't really know where to begin.

Oh, wait, how about here? "Books are being replaced by electronic formats that are superior in almost every way." While I read e-books and I agree that the format has definite benefits (search, notes, and so on), this statement is simply lazy: E-books that work with the most popular e-book reader, the Kindle, are locked down with DRM; you don't own a Kindle e-book, you license it from the company. Amazon has proven that they can legally change or remove a text without notifying the Kindle owner. That's a whole lot of qualification for an "almost."

But the real whopper is right here: "The new publishing paradigm is better for everyone. It's better for customers, because it's cheaper and more convenient to read and they have more choice." At the moment, the availability of e-books is meager; a lot of midlist titles simply aren't available in the format, and it will take a good long while before everything becomes available. If you were to imagine all the world's (legal) e-books as a physical store, the store would basically only be stocked up at the front: The stacks of bestsellers would be piled high and the legal thriller paperbacks would be lining the register counters. But when you walk through the store, past the hot books of the moment, a lot of the sections would be ill-stocked. (And let's not forget the fact that you can't keep most of your e-books in a single library. If you buy e-books from different stores, you're not going to be able to keep them in the same place; on your iPad, you'd need a Kindle app, a Nook app, and so on. If you want all your books in one digital location, you have to buy all your books from one retailer. How is that more choice for the consumer?)

And then we get to the grand finale: "That's how markets work. Firms that don't adapt fail, and those that do win. And as a result, everyone gets increased prosperity. After an era of bailouts and too big to fail, we should cheer the fact that outdated companies still fail."

This paragraph ruined my day. Fuck this guy.