First of all, a clarification: when right-wingers talk about “closing the borders,” this isn’t what they mean.

The big news over the past week is that Borders Books is officially going out of business.

Book lovers have expressed grief and dismay. One Borders fan called it “a case of internet outsourcing." He’s not too far off the mark. And this has been coming for a long time. (The photo above was taken a year and a half ago in Oxford.)

But Barnes & Noble continues to succeed, because there’s a difference between Borders and Barnes & Noble, a difference in how the two companies approached the book industry. Barnes & Noble has embraced the ebook—a little later than Amazon, but at least they did. Barnes & Noble has embraced online ordering. You can even special-order copies of my books at Barnes & Noble stores. And Barnes & Noble got the Starbucks deal, too. Barnes & Noble probably sells more coffee than books.

A friend recently asked me whether books would completely disappear. I had to correct her: ebooks are books, too. Now, I don’t think paper books will ever completely disappear. (That’s a different post.) However, ebooks present a number of advantages to authors, not only in what ebooks do for authors, but also in the market changes they portend.

Everyone keeps talking about the demise of the book industry, because people no longer buy books at bookstores. But if you include ebooks and online sales, the book industry is most certainly not dying. And if you include all reading of all online content, the writing industry is more active than ever. And the book industry is changing in ways that portend more and more good things for authors.