Susan's Place Transgender Resources

Something was missing from Christmas this year, I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I just figured it out, my last bit of shopping used to be a trip to Borders to get everyone a tube of chocolate covered sunflower seeds. Hugs, Devlyn

I know this is very late, but yes I miss it too (although I'm canadian) =( I remember being so happy to find up-to-date AP study guides (that I never used..but hey, I felt smarter buying it) because our bookstores only sold study guides that were 6 editions behind

The only time I ever bought anything from Borders it was a last-minute birthday gift for a friend (a Get Fuzzy book), and I got somehow guilt-tripped into buying my daughter an incredibly overpriced stuffed unicorn. It was soft and cute, and it had sparklies in its pink mane and tail. Having unicorn plushies in a bookstore is a lowdown dirty trick. :laugh:

I miss Borders too....I got pissed as hell when I saw that they were closing, but at least I got a mountain of comic books for extremely low prices out of it.

That was how they set them up. Books over here, exits over there, dirty lowdown tricks and tasty sunflower seeds in between! Hugs, Devlyn

The big box bookstores killed the independent bookstores, now Amazon, et al is killing the big box stores...

Luckily in Portland, we have Powell's Books.  Big box type store, but locally own.  One store.  40 years strong.

Just like South Park. They burn down Wal-Mart while singing Kumbaya and run off to the hardware store. When it grows into a home improvement store they burn it down singing Kumbaya and run off to...

I hate major bookstores. Huge floor plans with miles of rolling carpeted plains between the shelves that disguise the lack of actual stock. Independent bookstores with aisles too narrow to fit thru, further blocked by more stacks of books.

Plus, most Indie book stores have larger lgbt sections in spite of the miniscule size.

At Barnes and Noble we were also saddened to see Borders go...believe it or not but Bookstores have this unique relationship: we compete against each other but at the same time we root for another.

I remember when Borders closed. We (BnN) honored all of Border's gift cards that customers had purchased at Borders and we even let them use their Borders reward cards at our store.

A friend of mine was the Store Manager at Borders and it was kinda a low down thing with how corporate handle issues with customers. They sold gift cards and 25 dollar reward cards know they would be closing (before the general public knew). My friend had a strong clash of ethics regarding this.

Another neat thing was we hired almost the entire Borders staff who was let go so that if they loved books we had a position for them. Even some of the managers at Borders kept their management status when crossing over to BnN.

Some big bookstores really isn't that bad. Some people would tend to compare BnN to War*Mart with killing independent stores. No, the lack of people's interest are killing bookstores....no matter if it's independent or corporate.

15 years ago,  you had Waldens, B.Dalton, and Books A Million in one single mall. Now, you would be lucky to find any. So you need to adapt. If you don't you'll go out of business. Only reason why Barnes and Noble survived was because they followed Amazon's business type. Barnes and Noble actually offers more books at the same price online. Not many people know this....we have over 500,000 more book titles. On our ereader we have over 8 million free books (not the crappy xerox books...im talking about really good ones). BnN teamed up with Microsoft and Google so there is no fear of going the way of the dodo.

Also, BnN supports local and independent bookstores. We give grants to owners who wish to run a bookstore of their own. We donate millions of books (unused) to independent bookstores. We donate millions of books and money to charities and 3rd world nations who do not have access to libraries.

We rated 100% for LGBT scores up to and including SRS for transgender people. We do a lot of fun things for children (we are doing a Harry Potter night next weekend for four hours, the children are divided up into the four houses and compete for the house cup....awesome prizes, door prizes, and the child with the most points wins a nook...and it doesn't cost a penny to participate). Today we did a Star Wars night, the week before that it was a Curious George night).

So remember, BnN isn't this evil corporation hell bent on destroying independent bookstores. We actually embraced them. Hell, last year we filled up a New Age Bookstore with all donations of new books.

Oh....and our LGBT section is MASSIVE. Depending on where you live this will vary because there is only so much space in a physical store. It's like that with any bookstore...being independent or corporate. You find some books in one store but not in another.

We seem to be losing book stores very rapidly, Borders of course, then Angus and Coot, There was a truly wonderful privately owned store called Mary Martin's which had a special place in Adelaide society for people who love books, but that closed last week.

I think Dymock's is the only franchise left. I must buy at least one book a week from them so I'm doing my bit!

But the pressure from kindle type products are another nail in the coffin. Sad because browsing through a book store is a wonderful way to feel good.

Borders was one of my favorite places to just sit and read growing up (along with B&N)...Have found many books which turned out to be favorites there. I miss it.

I dunno, all these new e-readers and whatnot are kind of pissing me off...I know they're so much more convenient for some, and save on paper, but there is just nothing that can compare to actual books. I'd be okay if they weren't driving bookstores out of business  :-\

I am sure the Sumerians may have been upset when Egyptians used Papyrus versus clay stone tablets but they adapted.

I personally love my ereader.

I love borders! their travel and nature books were dirt cheap! I could walk out with a huge book on China for 6 dollars. Barns n Noble is okay. But borders had more of a variety in that section.

Quote from: Annah on October 06, 2012, 09:49:42 PM
Another neat thing was we hired almost the entire Borders staff who was let go so that if they loved books we had a position for them. Even some of the managers at Borders kept their management status when crossing over to BnN.

"Hmm... manager of a store that was part of a corporation that failed... you're hired!" (I'm only poking at the irony of how that sounded, so chill.)

I only read non-fiction, so as long as I have the internet, encyclopedias, and textbooks, I'll live.

Yes, Borders was a great store.  It just so happened to be founded in my home state of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.

I remember reading an article on why they fell and apparently they did not control the rights to their online sales.  The thought Amazon was not going to last and gave them their rights.  One of the bigger corporate blunders of this short century.

I still hold on to their book club card on my key chain as a memento.

That made me grab my keys! I still have one, too!

Borders... what did they sell again? Buggy whips? Lamp oil? No, wait-- books. I remember those.

Actually, I always loved Borders, too, as well as many other long gone bookstores I've known. I actually have a huge book collection accumulated from decades of scouting interesting old bookshops and making all the charity book sales in the region. The only down side to being a book lover is that they're a major (back) pain at moving time. I think real paper books will always have an audience because of the nostalgia factor and the simple joy of having an object in your hands you can touch.

~ Lyric ~

Meh, never bought new books so I have little to no use for B&N or Borders.  New books pretty much radically priced themselves out of the market once hardcovers went over $25 bucks, and that was a long time ago.  I rarely pay more than $10 for a hardcover now.  And there is very little to nothing that I can't find used that I really want.

Most of what I read - like a paperback every day or so - I leave when and where I finish it for the next person who comes along.  I have no interest in keeping them around.

"Most of what I read - like a paperback every day or so - I leave when and where I finish it for the next person who comes along.  I have no interest in keeping them around."

I like that! Hugs, Devlyn

Quote from: tekla on November 20, 2012, 11:41:18 AMMost of what I read - like a paperback every day or so - I leave when and where I finish it for the next person who comes along.

Me, too, actually. I've got a house full of books, but still check books out at the public library all the time.

At one point - toward the tail end of my professor days - I had two rooms full, floor to ceiling.  Losing them was one of the best things that ever happened to me (thought it took me a few years to realize that).  I have about 40 or 50 now, half of them music/songbooks.  After all there are only about 20-30 books I really want at my fingertips - Thomas Merton, Ernesto Cardenal (Cántico Cósmico "Cosmic Canticle" rocks my world), The Tao Te Ching, a bunch of old Greek/Latin philosophy and history along with Lattimore's translation of The Four Gospels and the Revelation, The Illiad and The  Odyssey, , Richard Feynman's Physics Lectures, a few poetry collections, and a few signed books, but just about anything else I want is either on-line or in a library.  Why should I drag it around, and have it accumulate space?

And, unless I'm at home I'm reading throwaway SciFi/True Crime/Mystery stuff.

I love books and owning them. I do not keep soft cover fiction or non-fiction books, but I am very partial to textbooks. I inherited my Grandpa's and my Dad's medicine, biology, and chemistry books. Both of them were physicians, yeah, it is like a family tradition.

I have accumulated books on military sciences, history, physics, and materials sciences. lately I am fascinated by the advances on metallurgy.

They just open a new BnN in my neck of the woods, downtown there is a bunch of small and quint bookstores.

Yeah, books are like panties, you can never have to many of them  :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

I love books, I read all the time, so much so that I stopped a rehearsal the other day by asking someone to look up a word for me that I didn't know* and everyone just stood there wondering what kind of word was it that I didn't know.  (Neither did they, we all had to look it up).

But all that stuff that we so gradually accumulate weighs us down in the end.  As we go on it seems to be very little - unnoticeable day by day - and even in the end.  Until you don't have it weighing on you and you realize how much all that material stuff not only held you up when you needed to move fast, it also was most likely holding you down too.

Perhaps that's not true for everyone, but when I lost everything and was bumming about it one of the real smart persons around me told me that I had just reached "Instant Buddha Enlightenment " and in time I would realize how light I truly was, and how that lightness translated into real freedom.  She was right.







*Thalassocracy

I stopped reading fiction decades ago, like in the 1980's...waste of time for me.

My reading urges pretty much stopped with transition (except for trans-process related material), but when I had the urge it was almost entirely what might be called "historical" books...books written in the 1920's, or pre-1960, detailing daily life in the US and certain other countries (Germany in particular, pre-WW1 and 2).

The big stores simply had nothing for me. I'd wander in, peruse the selection, maybe buy a picture book "US Army 1950-1990"...drool over the leather bound boxed set of Tolkien's LOTR (knowing full well I wouldn't likely read it again)...

So small, hole-in-the-wall stores were my choice...but their location "system" was horrible. Since I didn't know the names of any books, or their authors, I could only go to the front desk guy and ask, "Hey, do you have any books on daily life in the US, before 1940?"

And he'd say, "Weeeelll...maybe. I don't really know. Why do you want a book like that? What kind of info are you looking to find?"

::)

Jeez, dude, just show me where the books MIGHT be, and I'll look to see if any catches my fancy...

Enter Amazon...I can search for books using concepts, general ideas, and HEY PRESTO I get 5 pages of results...and, the best part is that each selection has "people who looked at or bought this book also looked at/bought this book"...

I've bought more books via the referrals than by my own searching. So, I really don't miss the bookstores.

Amazon is under investigation right now for trying to buy out publishers and bookstores and monopolizing it. I personally will never buy books from amazon...when you buy a book from amazon you are not giving the authors their full royalties. Ive been looking a lot into this

If you want to support an author, go to their website and buy the book through their Amazon (or whatever) link. That way they get the 6-8% affiliate income on top of the royalty.

It is a difficult topic. In Australia dept stores are having financial problems because so many are using on line shopping. I've bought clothes etc from branddirect for 70% less than I can buy it for here. Then I feel guilty for putting someone out of a job.

Then I don't pay (as much) tax on goods on line which is good. But then the Govnt needs the taxes to run the essential services. So am I saving money or deluding myself.

Sorry for the topic drift.

I generally buy about 50%v of my fiction from second-hand bookstores, and recycle most of my new purchases through them eventually.  Lots of interesting stuff in second-hand places.  Due to size difficulties I get a lot of my clothes from Op-Shops too.

Karen.

Quote from: Cindy James on November 26, 2012, 01:45:43 AM
It is a difficult topic. In Australia dept stores are having financial problems because so many are using on line shopping. I've bought clothes etc from branddirect for 70% less than I can buy it for here. Then I feel guilty for putting someone out of a job.

Then I don't pay (as much) tax on goods on line which is good. But then the Govnt needs the taxes to run the essential services. So am I saving money or deluding myself.

Sorry for the topic drift.

Yeah... I'm very wary of anything that potentially displaces worker-bees.  :-\

In relation to the topic - I absolutely love books! Particularly those with light-colored spines!

Nah... I once dreamt of floortoceiling books - but mostly use the library these days...

I don't miss Border's - I mean I'd miss it if it were my bookstore, but it never was, and my favorites are still around.  And the system - or lack thereof - is to me (at least) kind of charming.  It's OK that everything in the world doesn't run by the Dewey Decimal System (particularly when there are better systems like LoC).  I can almost always find what I'm looking for - but then again I don't browse bookstores as much as I lay siege to them.  When I lived in North Beach and I was trying not to spend any money at all (it all went to my kids college) I'd amble down at least once a week (sometimes more) and hide out in the basement of City Lights.  I read most of the poly sci/history/music stuff in 3-4 years.  And people would come down the stairs and ask in a real weird way "Kat?" and having found me (god only know how they were describing me up at the desk) would go "Hey, the guy upstairs said you should know..."  And I usually did.  The owner (who's kinda famous in his own right) would always bring me coffee down in "Subterranean Homesick Blues" world, if he showed up when I was there.  And took lots and lots of my suggestions.  He always said that every bookstore should have a scholar who had the ability to go "no, you don't want that one, you want this one" based on whatever factors were relevant.  As in, 'No, don't read any rock bio book until you've read: No One Here Gets Out Alive.  And once you read that one, you can pretty much skip the rest.  (there is a good book on the Beatles, and one on the Who, and Johnny Rotten's autobiography is funny at least.)  But the best books are either articles/commentary/reviews, or Griel Marcus, who's not really writing about 'bands' or 'artists' but more about ideas.

But what I miss is record stores.  You know with Crunchy McStoner behind the counter, who knew his costumers and his stock/product/inventory and could actually recommend new stuff that you actually liked.