As Tom not­ed back in Octo­ber, the north­ern por­tion of Cap­i­tal on the Quay is to become a Bor­ders’. Imag­ine a book­store with a giant foot­print, a café inside, and pos­si­bly the largest range of stock in town. That might well be what we’re get­ting.

Sev­er­al months lat­er it seems the the work is just about com­plete, and ear­li­er this week a sign appeared in the win­dow: open­ing is to be 8:00am this Thurs­day 15th.

At the Welling­ton­ista we’ve been keen­ly await­ing the open­ing: prob­a­bly more because we are hop­ing for some great open­ing bar­gains than any­thing else (not that we actu­al­ly know any­thing — please com­ment if you do).

Around the water­cool­er though, there’s been a bit of dis­cus­sion about Bor­ders’ entry into the Welling­ton book retail mar­ket: will it be good, or bad for the book-lov­ing pub­lic?

Expe­ri­ence of the Auck­land store var­ied: one of us felt that although the ini­tial stock on open­ing was broad enough to have peo­ple hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing (three dif­fer­ent edi­tions of “Finnegan’s Wake” — a bench­mark by which any book-store, ‑chain, or even soci­ety can be mea­sured he said, misty-eyed with remem­brance), over time it seemed to become less diverse.

But a cou­ple of the oth­ers have found the Auck­land store to be pret­ty good actu­al­ly, beat­ing out even Uni­ty in some areas (post-mod­ern Amer­i­can poet­ry, any­one?), and that the range avail­able is huge.

At this point, the con­cept of The Long Tail made its way into the increas­ing­ly thick soup of the con­ver­sa­tion. The idea applied in this case being that Bor­ders’ can gen­er­ate vol­ume and make mon­ey by sell­ing one or two copies of many many dif­fer­ent titles rather than flog­ging large num­bers of just a few very pop­u­lar titles. Which may bode ill for for our favourite small-but-more-spe­cialised book­shops else­where in town: Uni­ty, Vic Books, Par­sons, and even Dymocks all have their adher­ents up here in Welling­ton­ista tow­ers. It’s hard to say how it’s going to pan out: maybe Bor­ders’ won’t, or can’t com­pete against the inde­pen­dents, crimp­ing the Quay’s oth­er book mega­s­tore pre­tender Whit­coulls instead… or maybe not.