Bad news for bibliophiles around UT: Book store Follett’s Intellectual Property Austin on Guadalupe has announced that it will be closing its doors on March 14.
Every armchair store manager will have their theory as to why it failed (the argument seems to be splitting between high rents near UT, high prices, too much competition from other media and online outlets, and the general decline of Western Civilization.) It’s hard to take even the smallest solace out of the fact that the store is having a 50% off closing sale, because this closure is a double-whammy in two deeply worrying trends. Firstly, the well-recorded series of store and restaurant closures along the Drag (an alarming number of stores are known as “The one where that other shop was”). IP suffered from that, as even freshman students knew the building as “The Old Tower Records.”
Equally worrying is that this is the third large bookstore to close in Austin in the last year. B Dalton Bookseller in Highland Mall was one of many anchor stores to close in the north Austin shopping complex, while the Bookstop on North Lamar closed at the end of 2008.
This article appears in January 30 • 2009.
