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Borders’ New Site: You Can’t Always Tell A Book By Its IP Address

Written by Evan Schuman
May 30th, 2008
Borders this week officially stepped out of the shadow of Amazon and re-launched Borders.com, with an effort that scores points for creativity. The physical side of Borders (as in brick-and-mortar as opposed to Olivia Newton-John) has been trying to arrange its bookshelves to display more of the covers. This takes up more space and theoretically means that fewer books are displayed. But it also makes a more compelling "sell" for that book.

The dotcom side is trying something similar, but the virtually infinite nature of online means that the Borders site can display as many books as it wants. The ability to drag the shelf to the left or right keeps the cover images flowing. Called the "magic shelf," that feature "is way more robust than it was before" in beta testing, said Kevin Ertell, the Borders E-Commerce exec who is in charge of the site.

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