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.