We take the internet for granted today. It’s a part of our daily lives and a lot of people even making a living of the tubes. But it wasn’t always like this. For the younger generation, it might come as a surprise that the internet used to be a novelty.

I remember my dad telling me that only techies had  laptops and cell phones, and that email was pretty much something only businesses used.

How times have changed. Email is out. Social networking and Twitter is in. It seems that people socialize more online than they do in real life.

To show just how much of a novelty the internet was in the 90s, I came across some hilarious videos. The first is from the Today Show, where even the basic concept of the @ sign was a source of great confusion. The second video is from MTV.

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The RSS Feed for Brad’s Reader has been hacked. If you read the blog post titles in the feed, it says: “Buy Gold Viagra Without Prescription >> Online Pharmacy.”

I’m working to get the problem fixed as soon as possible. I apologize for the inconvenience and if anyone is offended by the viagra title. Please note that the website itself has not been affected and is safe to visit.

DO NOT CLICK ON THE TITLE LINK IN RSS FEED!

If you are viewing this in your RSS aggregator, you can read all my latest posts at bradsreader.com. Thank you for your patience.

I hate to keep kicking Borders after they’ve already fallen, but their downfall is a great study how not to run a book chain, or any retail chain for that matter. It’s easy to blame ebooks and/or Amazon for their failure. I’ve already argued that ebooks and Amazon really weren’t the reason why Borders failed.

What was the bookseller’s biggest enemy? Borders themselves. That’s right. I’ve maintained that it was their own bad business decisions that brought about their downfall. And the following comes from a former Borders employee and seems to had further evidence supporting this theory:

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I’ve been one of the unlucky Amazon affiliates to be dropped from the program because the state of Illinois passed a law that would require Amazon to collect taxes on all sales in the state.

The law says that the online seller must have a physical presence in the state, and Illinois considers affiliates to be a “physical presence.”

Affiliates in other states, such as California, New York, Arkansas, North Caroline, Hawaii, Colorado and others, have been dropped. Some web companies rely on Amazon’s affiliate program for a large chunk of their revenue. I know of at least one company in Illinois that relocated to Wisconsin to keep their affiliate status.

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I’ve already written about how the ‘Harry Potter’ franchise will be hard to replicate. It’s one of those anomalies that comes along once in a great while.

That doesn’t mean that publishers aren’t looking for the next Harry Potter. In fact, one publisher is already hoping they found the next big thing.

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One strong selling point of ebooks has been they can be enhanced, meaning, authors can add links to related websites and even videos, audio, music and anything else you wouldn’t find in a print book.

I’ll admit, even I promoted this idea as a step forward in the reading experience. But as I’ve been reading more and more ebooks though, my thoughts have shifted on the subject.

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Retail expert Howard Davidowitz says that the death blow to Borders Group Inc was when they turned over control of their website to Amazon back in 2001.

Not to toot my own horn, but I speculated the same thing in my last post about the Borders saga. They essentially gave their business to Amazon, which then proceeded to eat them alive.

Here’s the video featuring an interview with Howard Davidowitz. He not only gives his opinion about why Borders collapsed, but what will happen to all that retail space that will soon be vacant.

There’s more good news for ebooks: Publishers Weekly is reporting that ebook sales for the month of May jumped 147%. At the same time, print sales have continued to decline.

Not much else to say here other than I’m not surprised. I think we’ve reached the tipping point where ebooks will continue to overtake print book sales.

Here’s the brief Publishers Weekly article:

All major adult print segments—hardcover, paperback and mass market—showed a decline in sales in May, according to the AAP’s monthly sales report. While e-books showed a steep uptick of 146.9% for the month, bringing in $73.4 million in sales, adult hardcovers dropped 38.2%, adult paperbacks dropped 14.3%, and adult mass market fell 39.4%. For the calendar year, e-books brought in $389.7 million in sales, a 160.1% climb over the same period 2010.

The few bright spots for the month, on the print side, came from YA paperbacks, which saw an uptick of 4.7% for the month; university press paperbacks, up 3.4%; and religion books, which were up 21.6%.

We’ve now heard the death rattle of the Borders book chain and are waiting for the two liquidation companies that bought the bookseller out to throw the dirt on its grave.

But how did Borders get to this point? I’m willing to bet a lot of people will place the blame squarely on ebooks. And I’m willing to bet that they are wrong.

The downfall of Borders began, not with ebooks, but with a series of bad management choices going back over a decade. Here are a few highlights:

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I found this great video review of the Amazon Kindle (3rd generation) – the same one I have. It’s one thing to read my raves about the Kindle, but quite another to see a video of it in action.

This review shows you all the features of the Kindle, and even does a side-by-side comparison of this latest generation to the first Kindle that came out in 2007.

This video comes from our good friends at CNET. Enjoy!

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