Sure, there are places selling books — there are lots of places selling books — provided you’re interested in one of a tiny sample of titles. There was something vaguely North Korean about walking the length of the concourse and seeing the exact same hardcovers, over and over and over and over — Steve Jobs staring out at me every 20 steps or so from the shelves of any of 50 different shops, all utterly indistinguishable from one another.

Not long ago almost every major airport had a proper bookseller. Nowadays they are harder and harder to find. Usually, what passes as a bookstore is really just a newsstand. The vast majority of these outlets are owned and controlled by one of two companies: Hudson Group and an Atlanta-based company called Paradies Shops Inc. Both conduct business under numerous sub-brands that hawk a very thin selection of bestsellers, business books, thrillers and pop-culture trash.

The terminal guide at DTW told me there was something called Heritage Books — two of them, in fact, one at either end of the hall. That got my hopes up. Maybe I’d score a copy of Gary Shteyngart’s new novel.

As they say, good luck with that. Turns out that Heritage is just one of those Paradies Dba franchises.

They did stock a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom” (yet not “The Corrections,” which was much better), and obviously no retailer can get by without a token Malcolm Gladwell or two, a gesture to the “sophisticated” reader who is seeking something headier than “American Sniper,” or the latest Suze Orman guide to success, or one of two — two! — books by Chelsea Handler.

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

On the bright side, though, am I correct in observing that America’s fascination with Sudoku has begun to taper off?

Lingering resentment, yes. Several years ago I nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to get Paradies and Hudson to stock my own lousy little book, “Ask the Pilot — Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel.” I was stupid enough to think that the airport, of all places, might be a good selling point for a book exclusively about air travel. I’ll never make that mistake again. It was carefully explained to me that, no, it matters not what your book is about, captive audience be damned. What matters is getting on the company’s shortlist of airport-worthy bestsellers, or having your publisher pay for an airport promotion. Hudson carried “Ask the Pilot” briefly, into the fall of 2004, after which it disappeared from airports forever.

All of airport retailing, though, seems to suffer from a kind of dementia. This is something I explore in my famous essay, “What’s the Matter With Airports?” Enough already with the jewelry, the souvenir sweat shirts, the remote-control helicopters and the high-end luggage.

(The fixation with luggage is particularly strange to me. Who in the world buys luggage * after * they get to the airport? No wonder these places are always empty.)

How about something practical instead? Like a halfway decent bookstore.

But I digress.

Getting back to the positive…

Thanks to the many readers who contributed to my “Hidden Airport” collection. The idea, for those of you who missed it, is to highlight spots of unexpected pleasantness at U.S. airports. I showcased two: the garden adjacent to the Marine Air Terminal at New York’s LaGuardia, and the connector walkway between terminals B and C at Boston-Logan.

Several of you wrote in with pictures and descriptions of other little-knows oases. For example, the SFO Aviation Museum and Library at San Francisco International. But my favorite so far, I think, is the sculpture garden at the Greenville-Spartanburg (GSP) airport in South Carolina.  You can view it here in this interactive panorama put together by reader John Riley.

But what if you prefer e-books? Because of my job, I rarely buy print books. (I get too many sent to me as it is.) Yet, for various reasons, I’ve found myself purchasing a surprising number of e-books to read on my iPad. At first, I automatically opted for Kindle books; the Kindle app for the iPad works great, and if I decide to switch to reading on my iPhone, it will automatically keep my place. Above all, Amazon has the richest and deepest online books database, where I can instantly find out whether a title is available in e-book (or audiobook) format, scan reader reviews and follow reader-generated tags to find similar titles.

Many people assume that if you want e-books, you’ve got to buy them from Amazon or another online retailer. They’re wrong about that. You most certainly can purchase e-books from your local independent bookstore. I’ve done it myself several times since I made my resolution to avoid buying them from Amazon if at all possible. Two of my favorite New York booksellers — Greenlight Books in Brooklyn and McNally Jackson in Manhattan — participate in the Google e-books program. You can visit their websites, find the book you want and purchase it through Google, which gives the bookstore a cut. The prices are comparable and the Google Books app works as well as the Kindle one.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t still use Amazon to find out about e-books. From browsing in the Kindle store, I learned that Cornelia Read’s “Field of Darkness” — a 2006 mystery recommended by one of my favorite authors, Tana French — is now available as a Kindle e-book for a mere $1.99. So I popped over to McNally Jackson’s website, searched on that title and found that the Google e-book could be had for the same low price, whereupon I bought it there. (Admittedly, McNally Jackson’s cut on a $2 book can’t be much, but I’ve bought full-price e-books from them as well. This is just the most recent one I learned about first from Amazon.)

I call this practice “reverse showrooming,” and recommend it to e-book aficionados who want to break their Amazon habit. Unfortunately, not all indie booksellers participate in the Google e-books program, and those who do aren’t always adept at highlighting the option. The small publisher Melville House Press is trying to boost the program among booksellers by distributing free, customized “shelf talkers” for the MHP titles carried by individual bookstores. (Shelf talkers are those paper notices attached to book displays recommending particular title, usually as a staff pick.)

Melville House’s shelf talkers include a QR code — one of those enigmatic squares of black and white dots — that, when scanned by a shopper’s smartphone, will take her immediately to the bookseller’s website and an order page for the book. Instead of seeing the book in the store and having to look it up on Amazon in order to buy the e-book, the code makes it even easier to buy the e-book directly from the bookstore itself.

Dennis Johnson, Melville House’s founder, says that so far only a few forward-thinking booksellers have taken the press up on its offer. Times are tough for brick and mortar stores and he says many of them view e-book sales as “not their core business.” Google’s eBookstore got off to a slow start after launching a year ago and there have been bottlenecks when it comes to adding new books to the system, especially for smaller publishers like Melville House. Yet booksellers and publishers have nothing to lose by making this un-Amazon, pro-indie option more visible.

Not surprisingly, you can’t read Google e-books on your Kindle (except for the KindleFire), which is one reason why the most popular e-reader on the market isn’t necessarily the best. You can read Google e-books on smartphones, tablets like the iPad, the Nook, the Sony Reader and a variety of lesser-known e-readers, some with e-ink, others backlit. There are also rumors of a forthcoming Google e-reader and — after a recent survey showed that consumers are interested in an indie-branded e-reader — the head of the American Booksellers’ Association said they are “aggressively in the process of trying to develop a device that our members can sell as well.”

But if you’re one of the millions of Americans who owns an iPad or its Android equivalent, there’s no need to wait. You can make the switch from Amazon to indie e-books right now, and do your part in the coming year to keep your town or city a more bookish place.

Further reading

Why it’s more important than you may realize to support your local independent bookstore

The site of the Google eBookstore can tell you how to read Google ebooks on your device

A video demonstrating Melville House Press’ Digital Direct Shelftalkers

Publishers Weekly on a new survey showing customer interest in an indie-branded ereader

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, gazing at the deep-blue cover.

Kaplan is a guy who gets excited about all sorts of books. The difference, in this case, is that he published “Blue Christmas.” More precisely, his new imprint, B&B Press, released the book. It thus represents a heartening trend in the brave new world of publishing. Rather than trimming their sails, a number of independent booksellers are taking a page from Amazon by producing titles themselves.

Kaplan assured me his decision to launch a publishing arm had nothing to do with the online giant’s recent ploys, which include a notorious attempt to enlist readers as, essentially, retail spies.

His impetus, in fact, was the desire to publish a special limited edition of Les Standiford’s “Last Train to Paradise” to mark the centennial of Henry Flagler’s railway. At the same time, Kaplan explained, the local novelist John Dufresne “had this wonderful idea for ‘Blue Christmas,’ and since we had a team together, I thought, why not two at the same time? After all, there’s a tradition of bookstores as publishers. Shakespeare & Company published ‘Ulysses.’ City Lights published ‘Howl.’”

As publishers, indies enjoy a few distinct advantages over the competition. First, they can emphasize titles of local interest by local writers. Second, they can showcase the books in their shops. Third, because of advances in printing, they can bring books to market more quickly than traditional publishers. Just as important, when an independent bookstore sells a copy of one of their own titles, they collect all the profits, rather than a sliver. Consider it a poor man’s version of vertical integration.

Kaplan told me he hoped other bookstores would take up small-scale publishing. That’s already happening.

Consider Malaprops, in Asheville, N.C. When I arrived there for a reading a few weeks after my trip to Miami, general manager Linda Barrett Knopp was eager to talk with me about the revival of Burning Bush Press, Malaprops’ publishing arm, and its new title, “Naked Came the Leaf Peeper,” a wonderfully goofy serial novel in the spirit of the serial mystery “Naked Came the Manatee.” Leaf Peeper includes chapters from Carolina literati ranging from Tony Earley to Fred Chappell.

Barrett Knopp said the Burning Bush relaunch was intended to mark the store’s 30th anniversary. But getting back into publishing has been on the agenda for a while. “We originally thought about purchasing an Espresso Book Machine,” she explained, referring to the on-site machine that some stores use to produce library-quality paperbacks in minutes. They quickly realized it would be cheaper, and more efficient, to adopt the small-press model.

One of Barrett Knopp’s inspirations was her own husband, Brian Lee Knopp, who started his own press to publish a memoir of his years as a private eye, “Mayhem in Mayberry,” Malaprops’ top seller in 2011. That book’s success demonstrated not only the author’s irreverent appeal but also the power of Malaprops itself as a commercial vehicle. After all, as authors have long known, it’s the folks on the front lines that direct loyal customers to particular titles.

In this sense, Malaprops is simply taking advantage of what indies have always done best: serving as de facto community centers and literary recommenders. “We already have a long list of presales for ‘Leaf Peeper’ and the local buzz is growing,” Barrett Knopp said. She anticipates publishing two or three more titles in 2012 and envisions a day when Burning Bush will expand its purview to include regional books that are now in the public domain. Other area writers are already clamoring to be part of the effort.

Just down the road from Malaprops, in Spartanburg, S.C., I visited an indie that exemplifies this new model of the bookstore as publisher and purveyor. Hub City Books is an outgrowth of the Hub City Writers Project, which was launched 15 years ago to support local writers. The centerpiece of the project was Hub City Books, a small press that has published some 50 titles, including works by area luminaries such as Ron Rash and George Singleton.

For most of its history, Hub City sold its titles at Pic-a-Book, Spartanburg’s sole independent bookstore. Then, four years ago, Pic-a-Book went under. “We took a real financial hit,” explained Hub City’s executive director Betsy Teter, “because hometown sales were our bread and butter. And Barnes & Noble wasn’t doing the job for us. We couldn’t get the display we needed.”

As she lay in bed fretting over how to recover the lost sales, an idea hit Teter “like a bolt out of the blue”: Hub City should open a store. She found a location downtown, an abandoned Masonic Temple, launched a capital campaign that raised $300,000 to fix up the site, and opened for business in July 2010.

The building now houses the bookstore and the press, along with a coffee shop and bakery that rent space from Hub City. “We can get full retail price for our press titles here,” Teter told me, “versus giving up 60 percent at the B&N across town.”

Just as important, the store serves as a literary nexus that local residents are eager to support. Membership donations, offered at the register, have increased from 300 to 600 over the past year. Local writers hang out and browse. “Donors like seeing this bookshop on Main Street,” Teter said. “Plus sales in the second half of 2011 are up 8 percent over the same period last year, so we’re happy.” From what she can tell, Hub City represents an entirely new model: the bookstore as the public face of a nonprofit that also publishes and offers writing programs.

The leap into publishing by indies can be seen as the literary equivalent of the locavore movement. It not only emphasizes local writers, and local subjects, but also asks residents to support a local business with their dollars.

Teter is under no illusion about the forces arrayed against independent bookstores, not the least of which is the rise of electronic books. But she, along with her compatriots, is cautiously optimistic that small-scale publishing can be part of the answer, by providing an alternative to traditional publishers and Amazon, which are increasingly focused on books they can turn into national bestsellers.

As Kaplan reminded me, the true value of a great independent bookstore resides in its connection to a particular community: “If someone loves our bookstore, has been coming in for years, understands what we’re trying to do, and you can put a great book in their hands that was published by our store, I mean, who’s going to say no to that?”

Given recent news, you wouldn’t be crazy to wonder whether launching a bookstore in 2011 is such a good idea. But a conversation with Patchett suggests that to her, Parnassus Books is less a make-or-break business risk than an investment in her community — and a pulpit from which she can preach the gospel of the book.

Over the phone, the novelist described the development of Parnassus over the past few days, weeks and months — and explained why the hundreds of thousands of dollars she’s already poured into the project (and is prepared to lose) are already worth it, even if she’s placed the wrong bet on the future of the book.

So — how’s it going so far?

It’s going very well. I had to go to New York on about three hours’ notice to do the CBS “Early Show” yesterday, so it threw me off just a little bit. And then, if you’re on NPR and the “Early Show” and in the New York Times, you come home and have 700 emails from cousins. Really, a lot of cousin email — people I haven’t heard from in a really, really long time — and a lot of flowers and a lot of phone messages. It’s beautiful, it’s great — but I have really good manners. I have to write thank you notes; I have to write all these people back. And that makes me want to cry.

You must be excited, though.

I am. But it’s all very much like a really big wedding, where you’re walking the line between excited and so overwhelmed that it wrings the joy out of it.

Have you had any real moment of panic in the past couple of weeks? Or has it been mostly smooth sailing?

Well, it’s funny. You know, I have a partner, Karen Hayes, and she does all the work. That’s the long and the short of it. I do all the media, the publicity, the check-writing; frankly, the stuff that’s very easy for me, and the stuff that’s hard for Karen. And Karen does the stuff that is not easy for her, but would be impossible for me. But we have great division of labor.

I was in the store the day before yesterday, doing an NPR segment — and while I was doing that, I got the phone call that I had to go to New York. I said to Karen, “Why do I feel so nervous?” And she looked at me and she said, “Because it’s your turn now.” These last few weeks, when she’s been doing all the work, and I’ve just been coming in for a few hours in the afternoon to shelve books — I haven’t been nervous at all, because it’s really just not been my problem. And now it all is my problem!

Would you say the combination of a high-profile author and an experienced sales rep is a good one, as far as bookselling is concerned?

It’s genius. Genius.

So you’d recommend this to other writers?

I would recommend this combination to anybody. And we had no idea — we never sat down and said, “OK, this is going to be a really good combination for this reason.” It was such a lovely stroke of fate.

You said something in the New York Times this week about not being interested in “retail” or “opening a bookstore.” Do you see this as a sort of angel investment, rather than a business prospect? What would happen if you lost all the money you put into it?

I’d be fine.

You’d still feel it was worthwhile?

Oh, sure. Oh my God — knowing what I know now, just in terms of the publicity, and the goodwill … Even taking Parnassus and Nashville and that bookstore out of the picture. Just the fact that I have had the chance to be a spokesperson for books — to stand up for all my friends across the country who are independent booksellers, the people who have supported my career for the last 20 years — the fact that I can go on CBS and the front page of the Times and say, “Books are really important. Support your local bookstore.” Unbelievable. It would be worth every dime just to do that. I would have written somebody a check just to do that.

Do you think Nashville had to suffer the kind of loss it did — with two major bookstores closing down recently — for you to get such a positive response to your new store? It sounds like you’re getting a tremendous opening-week buzz — but is this the kind of thing that can only grow out of the death of other, older institutions?

Yeah. Well, I don’t know, because I haven’t seen it play out another way. But there is this feeling of a redemption narrative — we had our bookstores, and then we lost them. People have said to me, or to other people in the bookstore: “I feel guilty that the other bookstores closed. I should have been there more.” Which is actually not true, because the two bookstores that closed were both profitable. They were not closed because they were not making money; they were closed at a corporate level, because the corporations — Borders and Davis-Kidd — were dying.

I think people have a real sense that those stores weren’t great because they were so big. They also had impossible parking situations. Davis-Kidd moved into the mall 10 years ago; I hate the mall, and there was no way to just run in and get a book. The store was so huge, and the lighting was bad, and it was depressing. I started using Amazon. And when the store closed, I felt guilty. (“I should have circled the parking lot three more times until I found a space!”) I think that we all — myself included — have this feeling of “If I had known then, I would have been better. And now I’m getting a second chance.”

What’s so great is that it’s not just a second chance at a bookstore, but it’s a second chance at the bookstore of our youth, my youth. The little bookstore. The bookstore where the same people are in there every day, and they know you, and they remember you, and they’re happy to see you — and they give you a book that they really like. We’re not just going back to the bookstores that we had eight months ago; we’re going back to the bookstores that we had 30 years ago. We’re turning the clock way back.

What would you say are your top three favorite independent bookstores around the country?

McLean & Eakin, in Petoskey, Mich., is just my favorite bookstore. And the people who run it, the Norcross family — they’re fantastic. I became very good friends with them just because I love the store so much.

Boswell Books in Milwaukee, which is owned by Daniel Goldin, is another one. There was a chain of stores in Milwaukee called Schwartz’s — I think there were five or six Schwartz stores. When Mr. Schwartz died, the stores split up and were closed — and Daniel had been a manager at a Schwartz store for a long time, so he bought one. He’s had his own store now for about two years. He was incredibly helpful; it’s just different getting advice from somebody who has a store that’s brand-new, as opposed to having a store for 10 or 15 or 20 years. He had more nuts-and-bolts advice.

Also Square Books, in Oxford, Miss. Richard Howorth is the father of us all. (He would smack me very hard if he heard me say that!) Square Books has three stores on the town square … [Richard] became the mayor of Oxford — and the joke was, he was already the mayor — so why not just vote him in? He really is a tremendous leader for independent booksellers.

I could go on and on, but I would say those are my top three bookstores right now.

Why did you choose to set up a membership program for customers? Do you think that’s a sensible business model?

Greenlight Books in Brooklyn did a similar program. And they have also been incredibly inspirational, because they — again — are the new kids on the block, and we’re sort of following them in. Interestingly (and Karen would disagree with this, because she’s so much thriftier than I am), to me, the choice [to go down this route] wasn’t so much about the money. Because I can cover it — I’m definitely in to pay for the whole thing. But [a membership program] gives people a sense of commitment, and ownership. I think it’s psychologically a really good program, because if you make an investment — if it’s $75 or $5,000 — in the store, you’re probably going to be more likely to say, “I’m going to go Christmas shopping in Parnassus — I’m not going to Amazon this time. I’m going to go back to my bookstore, because it’s my bookstore.” And we definitely, definitely want people to have that feeling.

What will your day-to-day involvement with the store be like? Will you be focused on this project for a while — or will you need to get back to writing?

I’m writing a book of essays right now, which is the perfect project for this time, because it’s a lot of compiling, and going back and rewriting and working from things I already have. It’s something that’s easy to pick up and put down. I would kill myself if I was writing a novel right now — it would just break my heart.

I will be in the store a lot through Christmas. But I’ve been very clear from the get-go that, while it might be fun to have a novelist sell you a novel, it’s not the best use of the novelist. I think that everybody in town understands that. I’m the springboard — but I’m not the draw. People are not coming in because they really hope to see me; they’re coming in because they want books. And they want to be there.

I will blog — I can barely even bring myself to say the word; I am not an online, social media person! — but there are so many things about this whole project that I never thought through or imagined in advance. The fun part for me is recommending books. Because I am an enormous, passionate reader — and I really, really want to say to people, “This is the book you have to read.” It’s who I am. I do it to my friends all the time. The idea that I could take that burden off of my friends, and put it on a website, and then have a table in the store that says, “These are the books that Ann Patchett is recommending on the blog” — that’s paradise, for me.

So, I will do that; I will continue to do the media, and I will be in and out of the store. But I won’t be living there.

You’ve said that the name of the store, Parnassus, is a reference to the mountain in Greece — but have you ever read the Christopher Morley novels (“Parnassus on Wheels” and “The Haunted Bookshop”), which feature bookstores called Parnassus? Did you ever visit the bookstore called Parnassus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1960s and ’70s?

No. No, on all counts. Parnassus was completely and totally Karen’s name — and I didn’t know anything about it. A name is not something that you can decide on democratically when there are two of you, and I thought, “You know, she’s the one who’s got to go to work there every day — if she wants to go to work in a store called Parnassus, great!”

Titles are so funny. Your book grows into its title, and your store grows into its name. And your children grow into their names. Now that the store is open, people say, “Oh, Parnassus! That’s so great!” Whereas before the store was open, people said, “What? What’s it called? I can’t remember that name!” So I think it’ll be terrific — or it already is.

But Borders also brought its stores to communities where there might not have been a long-standing independent. For many people, and for many writers, a Borders could be a shining cultural center off the highway.

Before heading over to check out the liquidation sales, we polled a variety of authors — newcomers and veterans, prize-winners and best-sellers — about their Borders memories and their thoughts about the future of book buying.

Ann Patchett, author of “State of Wonder” and “Bel Canto,” among other books:

Borders was incredibly good to me when I published “The Magician’s Assistant” in 1997. They adopted that book and got behind it in every way possible: promotional discounts, store readings, newsletters. I went out to Ann Arbor several times for parties and corporate dinners and I have many memories of the people being so kind to me. They were all readers; they all wanted to talk about the characters. I drew a picture of a rabbit in everyone’s copy. It seems impossible now to think of that many people getting behind my third book when the first one didn’t do so well and the second one did terribly.

I never lost my appreciation for Borders. Our Borders in Nashville closed several months ago. It was a good store with terrible parking. Vanderbilt and Barnes & Noble are taking over the space for the school bookstore. In the meantime, I’m opening a little independent with a former Random House sales rep, Karen Hayes. As the 30,000-square-foot superstores go by-the-by, I still think there’s a place for a little independent. Right? Check in with me next year.

Lauren Groff, author of “The Monsters of Templeton” and “Delicate Edible Birds”:

I grew up in the tiny village of Cooperstown, N.Y., where there were precisely two places to buy new books: the grocery store, which had all of your sexy and bloody stuff; and Augur’s Books, which slowly replaced most of their bookshelves with baseball jewelry and signed balls until a tiny but beautifully curated collection remained. Beyond that, there was the annual library book sale, where you could get an 1890s “Daniel Deronda” and complete Modern Library collections of Sir Walter Scott with squished insects inside.

When I first came to a blockbuster bookstore — bright, cool, caffeinated, filled with endless quantities of books that smelled clean and had no silverfish running out of them — it seemed not unlike my idea of heaven. The truth is I love bookstores, any bookstores. I’m terribly sad when an indie goes out of business, but I’ve never fully understood the rage against big chain bookstores, because I’ve found that, more likely than not, they’re staffed by smart, passionate, well-read book lovers. It breaks my heart that these people will now be out of jobs.

As a citizen, it’s cause for mourning, because you worry about people eating and paying rent; as a writer, it’s also scary because we need all the solvent book-readers we can possibly get. It seems to me that we should reserve our fury about this for the virtual bookstores who don’t love teachers or firemen or roads or municipal water supplies or feeding hungry children at least one good meal a day in school. You know, all the things that make civilization more sturdy, and all the things that are supposed to be paid for by taxes — which aforementioned virtual bookstores somehow believe they’re above.

And it also seems that it’s time to pounce on my long-held dream of opening up an indie in Gainesville, Fla., where I live now. I mean: We have a huge research university, a strong DIY culture, and even an annual punk music festival. But we don’t have a good new-books indie bookstore? Travesty! I hope that others around the country will also be inspired, and that the likelihood of their acting on these dreams will be far more likely than mine.

Kevin Brockmeier, author of “The Illumination” and “The View From the Seventh Layer,” among other books:

I think there’s a very simple way to judge a bookstore, and that’s by the quality of the books on its shelves. The truth is that I’ve only known three Borders branches well — in Ann Arbor, in Madison, Wis., and in Gainesville, Fla., — but at each of them, I’ve discovered books I grew to love, and not just best-sellers, either, but strange little small press books: “In the Forest of Forgetting” by Theodora Goss, “I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing” by Lucia Perillo, “Written Lives” by Javier Marias.

Each of the cities I mention has also recently lost a venerable local independent: Shaman Drum in Ann Arbor, Canterbury in Madison, and Goerings in Gainesville. I’ve been saddened to see them close their doors, too. It seems obvious to me that the loss of any bookstore, whether it’s a chain store or an independent, is a blow to the community of readers who support it.

Undoubtedly it’s a reflection of my fixations that the first questions I ask about any city I visit is, “Where are the bookstores, and are they any good?” My hometown, Little Rock, Ark., has one surviving chain bookseller, a Barnes and Noble, and one surviving independent, WordsWorth Books and Company. Should either of them shut down, I’m certain I’ll feel that my own life has been diminished — and not simply my professional life, my writing life, but my life as an adventurous reader, an explorer of sorts, hungry for the company of like-minded people.

Tom Bissell, author of, most recently, “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter”:

Borders hails from my home state, Michigan, and I’ve always felt attached to it for that reason, insofar as anyone can feel attached to a company that goes übernational. Maybe that was Borders’ mistake; maybe all bookstores should be local bookstores. We’re selling books pretty well in this country; what we’re doing less well is figuring out what appropriate expectations in that endeavor now are. What I do know is that I find the prospect of the next 10 years very unnerving, both as a writer and a reader, and it seems so sad that of all the chains to go down first, it had to be Borders.

Anthony Doerr, author of “About Grace” and “Memory Wall,” among other books:

Several times in the late 1990s I went on long drives with my then-girlfriend-now-wife to Ann Arbor. We drifted like lost children through the warrens of Borders, the original store, the big one. I had zero experience with big bookshops and walking into that Borders was like walking into the World’s Fair — one sensed strains of possibility were drifting between the shelves. I read the first 20 pages of “Lolita” (for the first time!) in that store. I saw McSweeney’s (the one that was a box with lots of little booklets inside) for the first time in that store. I destroyed my checking account in that place.

Five or six years later, just before “About Grace” came out, my editor flew in from New York, and I flew in from somewhere, and together we went to have dinner in Ann Arbor with the book buyers for Borders. These were booksellers who had made it big, and they were sweet, smart people who could talk about Anne Rice and Amy Hempel over crab cakes. One had the sense they had been to a lot of dinners like that one. My editor and I had the weird job of trying to convince them that my big, strange book was something they should pay attention to. I tried bad jokes; my editor tried cigarettes. I left wondering: How did three or four people in Michigan get the power to determine how many copies of a novel go to a bookshop in Anchorage and how many go to a store in Fort Lauderdale?

What does the demise of Borders mean? It means we lose a few more dazzling temples to the written word. It means more good people lose their jobs. And it means — one can hope — that there’s more room in the meadow for some upstart saplings. Keats was right: “There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.”

Jim Shepard, author of, most recently, “You Think That’s Bad”:

Most writers like myself, who’ve been happier with reviews than sales figures, have been much better treated over the years by independent booksellers than by the chain stores. But even so, the closing of Borders is bad news for everyone, given that it’s yet more evidence of readership itself shrinking everywhere. And without reading, our chance to educate ourselves and operate in our own best interests, as part of both a larger and smaller community, atrophies to the point of disappearance.

Eleanor Henderson, a uthor of “Ten Thousand Saints”:

The first time I set foot in a Borders bookstore was around the year 2000, when the chain opened a massive two-story storefront on Church Street in downtown Burlington, Vt. I was going to college in a tiny town 45 minutes away, and nearly every weekend, I would drive to Burlington with my then-boyfriend/now-husband and spend the day strolling up and down the pedestrian street. Since usually it was zero degrees outside, and since usually we didn’t have any money, we ended up spending most of our hours in Borders, browsing through the acres and acres of books and magazines and music.

I don’t remember if the city of Burlington put up a cry of protest when Borders came to town — Vermont, land of no billboards, is a famous fighter of the box store — or what the impact was on other local booksellers. My boyfriend and I did spend a fair amount of time in the sweet and faithful used bookstore down the street, Crow Bookshop, as well as the lovely Vermont Bookshop in Middlebury. The books that the Vermont Bookshop didn’t have on its few shelves the store was happy to order for us. But going to Borders was an experience; it was an evening; it offered all the childhood joys of roaming a museum-size library. And it brought me closer to literature I wouldn’t have accessed easily elsewhere. I bought Lorrie Moore’s “Birds of America” there, and Poets & Writers, and a special edition of the Paris Review. That I could sip an overpriced soy latte while also admiring the eye-catching aisles of bookmarks, gift bags, Christmas cards and Monet-inspired address books was a bonus for this culture- and commerce-starved college girl.

Back in February, in the course of the same week, two bookstores in Ithaca, N.Y., announced they would be closing their doors: Borders, the center of our shopping-mall experience, where my 3-year-old son loved to park himself on the carpet to paw through board books, and Buffalo Street Books, the 30-year-old independent bookstore downtown. Within weeks, the city of Ithaca rallied together to save Buffalo by selling shares and turning it into a cooperative. The space that was Borders now retails thousands of square feet of flax clothing. The box stores may have killed downtowns, but now the Internet is killing the box stores. I’m not blameless in this little murder; I too have succumbed occasionally to super-saver shipping and one-click check-out. And while, as a new author with a fresh understanding of the importance of the indies, I now support our co-op with an annual subscription, I regret the passing of the brightly lit behemoth that provided me with good books and strong caffeine at a time when I needed both.

When my first novel came out last month, I was proud to give the first reading of my tour at that Borders on Church Street. When the other bookstores in Burlington didn’t return my publicist’s calls, Borders welcomed me on short notice, and its staff gave me a kind reception — eager, it seemed, to hold on to the last of its patrons, holding out hope that they might make a good thing last.

Maile Meloy , author of “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It,” among other books:

My favorite tiny independent bookstore just closed, and I’m still in mourning. I took my stepmother there because she’d been listening to NPR while driving across the country, and she heard about a book she wanted to read. She couldn’t remember the name of the author or the title of the book, and she couldn’t remember what show she was listening to or what state she’d been in, and she couldn’t even remember what the book was about. I put her in front of the store’s owner, who guessed what it was and found it instantly. That’s what we’re losing with these stores — a knowledge of books that borders on the psychic, and also someone to hand us books we don’t yet know we want. Those books that everyone doesn’t already know about are losing passionate champions.

Erica Jong, a uthor of “Fear of Flying” and editor of the new “Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex”:

I’ve always thought that bookstores were meant to be small and curatorial and in touch with their readers. The issue is how to make this model work financially. Large bookstores, which put so many of the small ones out of business, are now struggling as well. Can we reimagine the bookstore in a way that enables it to compete with online discounters? The best bookstores are meeting places, cafes, places where you get good advice about books and life. If I had a bookstore, I would have a fortuneteller there, matching up books and people. I would also have a psychologist and several excellent writers advising would-be writers. I would definitely encourage dogs. Who can write without a dog?

Dan Menaker, author of, most recently, “A Good Talk,” and longtime Random House editor:

I’ve visited many wonderful Borders stores, especially in the Northeast, and I’m very sorry that they’re going out of business. Any diminution of retail book outlets seems to me sad, and this chain has been with us for decades. The closing of its shutters reflects not only what many think has been poor management but also, clearly, the dramatic rise in e-book sales, for which stores are not necessary and prices are often cheaper. (Full disclosure: I am a consultant for Barnes & Noble.) B&N is doing what I think is a very smart job of combining its retail outlets with its growing e-presence, especially in coordinating its e-reader usage with in-store marketing and sales. But it remains to be seen what will happen to those bricks and that mortar. Only good things, I hope.

Of course, in many respects for serious readers (I’d irresponsibly say there are about 500,000 in this country) nothing can ever beat or will ever replace true independent bookstores with a knowledgeable staff and often almost curatorial management. Some — maybe even a decent number — will survive, I believe. But overall, I think none of us really know where bookselling will land over the next five to 10 years. The dust and the dust jackets are way up in the air and will take a long time to settle. When we’ve been immersed in a certain kind of cultural history — in this case “book books,” which have been with us for 500 or 600 years — we tend to think of it or want it to be permanent. It can’t be and it isn’t. By just widening the lens of our historical cameras, we can see that 500 or 600 years isn’t really long at all.

Right now, the best metaphor I can think of for publishing, writing, agenting and bookselling is the Wild West. Greater order will come along eventually, but at present that world seems to me to be in an inchoate scramble. Will Amazon become a publisher? It already is, to some extent. Will publishers be superseded? For the most part, I think so, at least in their traditional business roles. Will agents continue to have a function? This one is the easiest question to answer: Yes. Most writers cannot contractually and financially fend very well for themselves, no matter what the format. Will e-piracy affect publishing and bookselling as it has the music business? No question about it, seems to me — another reason it’s so hard to conjure with what will happen to the industry. Stealing a book from Borders is one thing. Making it available illicitly on the Internet is quite another. And writers can’t fill stadiums the way rock and pop stars can and thus don’t have a chance at those kinds of replacement revenues.

Book-length texts will survive — though generally trade books have been getting a little shorter, seems to me. The e-reader diet, one might call it. Right now we are living through a stupendous cultural transition in our life of letters. That life will perdure, even if perhaps with shorter and more fragmented readers’ attention spans. Human beings will always need a) stories and b) detailed information in text form, as long as there are human beings and until those texts and that information can be directly implanted in our cortexes without archaic symbols — print or pixels — like these.

Katie Crouch, author of “Girls in Trucks” and “Men and Dogs”:

It’s a real shame to see one more bookseller go. Borders was very supportive of all sorts of writers. Still, I remain stubbornly positive about the publishing industry.

“No one reads!” How many times have I heard that? Yet I see people reading all the time, everywhere I go. I recently wrote an article about books and writing, and my computer nearly exploded with responses. People are fiercely passionate about reading, now more than ever.

This is not the time for writers to despair. This is the time for us to put the earplugs in, get off the Internet, and work even harder to write books the world cannot go without.

Darin Strauss, author of “Half a Life” and “The Real McCoy,” among other books:

It makes me a little sad and also a little scared; it’s never good when something so big — and therefore big to our business — as Borders is in this kind of trouble. And I have personal reasons to feel blue — Borders was always kind to my books, which meant a lot, especially when I was starting out. Now, I love independent bookstores, most of all and of course (what book lover doesn’t?). Powell’s, Tattered Cover, Elliott Bay, the Boswell Books Co. in Milwaukee — these are special places. And I’ve had a really good relationship with, and have a soft spot for, Barnes & Noble — which has done a much better job than Borders, it seems. So those places strike me as irreplaceable. But Borders being liquidated is upsetting — not least for its 11,000 employees, of course. Publishing will survive. There’s no doubt about that. But this is sad.

James Atlas, author of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz biographies, and president of Atlas & Co.:

Every day for months I’ve gone by the Borders at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue and wondered how much longer it would be there. After we lost our Upper West Side Barnes & Noble last January — if an opera house, a ballet company and two concert halls could survive at Lincoln Center, the heart of New York culture, why couldn’t a bookstore? A year, two years, I thought, yet somehow the chain’s bankruptcy doesn’t seem premature, however ignominious. No bids! It was inevitable — what else could the emergence of the e-book have portended if not the disappearance of “the book”?

As a publisher, I had a visceral feel for the consequences of this massively transformative event. It was only a year or two ago that our beautiful books would arrive at the office in their boxes, and as we lifted them out and held them in our hands, there was always a palpable — and I mean this in the literal sense — sensation of having achieved something real. All those months and years of commissioning the book, urging it along, eliciting it from (more often, prying it out of the hands of) the author, editing it, revising it, copy-editing it, designing the cover, presenting the book to the sales reps, writing the jacket and catalog copy, soliciting blurbs — and in a more general sense, working at a job that paid little and offered little prestige … after all that labor, here was the result. It had all been worthwhile.

Now they arrive and we wonder what to do with them.

It’s like sending an email without an address. Where would it go? The last step is missing. Yes, we have Barnes & Noble (not for a whole lot longer, I predict); and yes, we have independent bookstores (fewer and fewer, less and less viable). We have Amazon (and it’s a good thing, too). The big question, though, is: Can books survive as a largely virtual experience? Doesn’t their very existence as a form of communication, a great technology, depend on their being physically present? I used to think so; now I’m not so sure.

As new e-book platforms proliferate (the Nook, the Vook, the Droid, the Ipad), readers aren’t disappearing; they’re adapting. They are buying — so far the evidence is only anecdotal — more books, if only because they can. Talk about an impulse buy — type in a name, push a button, and it arrives in 60 seconds (actually more like 10 seconds; Kindle is just being conservative). The ease of the transaction encourages the book consumer in the false belief that all these books will actually be read; when you can’t see the pile of books by the bedside, you’re not so intimidated by it. And the fact is, books are getting shorter. Our attention span has been severely attenuated by the information overload. The e-book is better suited to this length. And with print-on-demand, the end of the returns system, which is killing the industry, is at hand. Consumers will become more tolerant of rising book prices in e-book form. Meanwhile, the quality of resolution and color and facility of page-turning and underlining and marking places and other activities and features that we cherish in the physical book will become enhanced. Finally, there is always AbeBooks — the greatest virtual store ever. So it’s not over ’til it’s over. The fat lady has not sung.

Delia Ephron, co-writer of the screenplay for “You’ve Got Mail” and author of “How to Eat Like a Child” and “The Girl with the Mermaid Hair” :

Borders was a wonderful chain. It had great taste; it was interesting. I love all bookstores — all sorts and all kinds — and I’m happy in them; I grew up loving bookstores, so the loss of any bookstore is sad, and the fact that bookstores are threatened is just upsetting.

But getting angry or upset about these changes that are so obviously taking place is almost a fruitless activity. The important thing is that people still seem to love to read — and of course, writers will never stop writing. It’s always been hard for books to find their audience; it’s never been a problem utterly solved by the business. The fewer bookstores there are, of course, the fewer ways there are to solve the problem.

I just don’t think these things — what direction things take, and why they take that direction — are ever as predictable as everybody thinks. Everyone thought people were going to stop going to the movies, because there were DVDs — that movie theaters would be over. And movie theaters aren’t over. So I don’t know exactly where this leads or what direction it takes.

I remember when Dutton’s closed in L.A. a couple of years ago — it was just like having a friend die. That’s what happens if you lose Borders. You feel like your friend’s not there anymore; it’s a personal feeling of loss. Now that we’re losing more and more opportunities to buy books — to browse, to hang out. But maybe someone will invent some sort of wonderful thing, some place where everyone goes to read books. As someone who has a book coming out, I refuse to be negative in any way about this.