So have you tried to buy anything from Borders.com lately? As you probably know, Borders declared bankruptcy over the summer and began liquidating their stores shortly thereafter, but their website presence remained unchanged, at least at the time.
No longer. Type in www.borders.com and you’re taken to a landing page on the Barnes & Noble website.
This isn’t a page on borders.com referring to a redirect. The redirect is happening at the domain level, taking the user to barnesandnoble.com. Wow.
As a part of their bankruptcy, Borders opened their customer information and domain names to bidders in an auction. ( Hmm, I wonder why they didn’t use e-bay…) The auction involved 50 rounds of bidding and included both booksellers and online retailers. Apparently Barnes & Noble paid $13.9 million.
Which makes you wonder whether or not Amazon was a part of the bidding. And I’ll look into why Amazon perhaps didn’t care too much about the borders.com domain name next time…
President of Outskirts Press 