Last week, Quillblog posted about the travails assailing the bookstore chain Borders U.K. The British company has now “admitted defeat and limped into administration,” in the trenchant words of one Guardian article. That article blames Borders’ demise on the ascendancy of Amazon and large superstores offering deep discounts on titles.

But the news may not be all bad, according to a couple of Guardian columnists. Robert McCrumb suggests that it might be “tempting to see the end of Borders as another consequence of the hurricane that is hitting the usually tranquil boulevards of the British book world,” but this would amount to a misreading of the current landscape. Blaming Borders’ disappearance on “market forces and internal mismanagement,” McCrumb says that the advent of digitization will likely render the “drama on the High Street” insignificant. This, coupled with the rise of something McCrumb calls “Globish” “ “the global explosion of the English language” “ is likely to mitigate the negative fallout from the current situation:

As the second decade of the 21st century heaves into view all the signs are that “Globish” (English as a global lingua franca) is going to make the shock of digitisation, and the demise of High Street bookselling, a transitional not a cataclysmic moment.

For her part, Rachel Cooke doesn’t see bookstores vanishing in the wake of Borders’ demise. Taking issue with “those dullards who swear by Amazon” (Cooke’s words, not Quillblog’s), she suggests that shopping for books “is like shopping for clothes, or a husband: sometimes you don’t know what you want until you see it, and this is where a good store comes in.” Cooke goes on:

I wonder: have any of these people stopped to think what a world without bookshops would be like? It would be bad enough for writers and for publishers but it would be even worse for readers. Ask any truly passionate reader and they will tell you of a childhood that involved one or all of the following three things: an enthusiastic teacher or parent; a good local library; a good local bookshop. I still mourn the passing of the bookshop I frequented as a child: W Hartley Seed of West Street, Sheffield, a redoubtable hang-out where you could lose not only your parents “ off they went to crime, or birdwatching “ but yourself, for hours and hours. Oh, the relief of it, after the misery and tedium of school. Then, if you were really lucky, you got to take some booty home afterwards. [Here we presume Cooke is still referring to shopping for books, as opposed to a husband.]

It has not escaped Quillblog’s notice that Cooke’s wistfulness is brought on by a bookstore that has … ahem … closed, but it’s a nice sentiment nonetheless.