An offer I really could refuse

The other day, with some money my nan gave me, I went into Borders in Kingston to get some books. I hoped to take advantage of the “three for the price of two” offer they’ve got going, but in the end couldn’t find three books I actually wanted that badly among the selection they had in Kingston. (Noam Chomsky doesn’t float my boat, even if he floats other Muslims’.) I ended up buying Libby Brooks’ The Story of Childhood: Growing Up in Modern Britain. When I got to the checkout, they gave me the offer of 15% off my next purchase if I’d sign up to their email list. I thought, why not? So I did.

Anyway, my coupon arrived in email - you have to print it out - a couple of days later, and today I went up town after work with the intention of finding a book, preferably a computer book, to spend it on. There are actually two Borders stores in the West End, one on Charing Cross Road and one on Oxford Street. I headed downstairs to the computer section, and found it as inadequate and disorganised as ever. Trouble is, computer books have actually gone up dramatically in price over the last few years. For example, the earlier edition of Mac OS X for Unix Geeks for OS X.3 (Panther) cost me £17.50 at Blackwell’s; the Tiger edition costs £24.95. How on earth do they justify that? The least I could pay for any of the O’Reilly books I thought I might find useful was £24.95, and 15% off that is really not much: the price is still more than £20. For most of them there is twice that discount on Amazon.

And Borders, frankly, doesn’t inspire me with any great loyalty, unlike the independent bookstore Foyles across the road. I’ve written about the issue of buying in shops versus buying on line here before, and I buy from bookshops sometimes because I don’t want to wait, but also because they let you browse the books and you can’t do that on Amazon. Foyles actually used to give me discounts as a regular, and they sometimes have other offers, but the thing that keeps me going back to Foyles is that their computer section is simply the best in London. It’s big and it’s well-organised, which is much more than can be said for the section at either of Borders’ West End shops. I found nothing that I wanted so desperately that I could not buy it off Amazon and get a better discount.

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