What Barnes & Noble bought out of the wreckage
By the late summer of 2011 the most valuable thing Borders still owned was not a store. It was the name on the sign, the web address and a list of everyone who had ever signed up for a rewards card.
Barnes & Noble bought all three at a bankruptcy auction on September 14, 2011, for $13.9 million. The package covered the Borders, Waldenbooks and Brentano's trademarks, the internet domain names and a customer database holding records on 48 million people.
The customer list was the part that nearly broke the deal. Privacy advocates told the bankruptcy court that those 48 million people had handed their names, email addresses and phone numbers to Borders rather than to its largest competitor. The court made Barnes & Noble write to every one of them and give them 15 days to refuse the transfer, which it did by email once the deal closed in October 2011.
Barnes & Noble has controlled borders.com ever since. The Borders online store stopped taking orders that autumn, and the address has pointed at barnesandnoble.com since October 2011.
Are there any Borders stores left in 2026?
Not in the United States. The last American Borders stores closed on September 18, 2011, and nothing has carried the name in this country since.
The brand kept trading abroad, because Borders Group sold franchise rights overseas long before it failed. Al Maya Group, a distributor based in the United Arab Emirates, signed a franchise agreement covering the Gulf in 2006 and opened its first Borders in Dubai that year. In 2015 it bought lifetime rights to the name in the Middle East and rebuilt the shops around books, toys and stationery rather than books alone. Borders-branded stores still trade in the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, and nobody publishes a running count of them.
Malaysia had the other survivor. Berjaya Books opened Borders stores there in 2005 and kept them running for twelve years after the American chain died, closing the last of them in August 2023.
In the United Kingdom the name went early. Borders UK was sold to the London private equity firm Risk Capital Partners in 2007 and collapsed into administration in 2009, two years before its former American parent filed for Chapter 11.
Where to find one today. Nothing new carries a Borders logo in the United States, so what is left is memorabilia: rewards cards, name badges, tote bags, bookmarks, staff shirts and store signage that walked out of the buildings during the 2011 going-out-of-business sales. Most of it surfaces on Etsy's search page for Borders bookstore items. Price depends almost entirely on how much store branding is on the object, so a sign or a badge costs many times what a used gift card does.
What is the Borders name worth to Barnes & Noble in 2026?
Barnes & Noble is not the wounded chain that bought those trademarks. Elliott Investment Management agreed in June 2019 to take it private for about $683 million, or $6.50 a share, and put James Daunt, who was already running Waterstones in Britain, in charge of both companies.
Under Daunt the chain stopped shrinking and started opening again. Barnes & Noble finished 2025 with 702 stores, a total that included nine it picked up with the Books Inc. acquisition, and Daunt told Publishers Weekly that the number of stores it would open during 2026 would "start with a five or a six."
Not one of them is a Borders. Barnes & Noble has held the trademarks for fifteen years without putting the name back on a storefront or a website, which is the ordinary fate of a retail brand bought in a liquidation. The buyer wants the customer list and the web traffic, not a second chain to run.
So the ownership answer is short. Borders belongs to the rival that outlasted it, and that rival has no use for it beyond keeping it out of circulation.
How Kmart stitched Borders and Waldenbooks together
Borders began in 1971 as a used bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, opened by the brothers Tom and Louis Borders. Its real advantage was software. The brothers built an inventory system that predicted which titles a particular town would buy, which let their stores stock tens of thousands of titles instead of the few thousand a mall bookshop carried.
That caught the attention of Kmart, which had bought the mall chain Waldenbooks in 1984 and wanted the superstore end of the market too. Kmart bought Borders in 1992 and ran both chains together.
The arrangement lasted three years. Kmart spun the business off in 1995 as Borders Group, listed in New York and headquartered in Ann Arbor, with Waldenbooks as a subsidiary.
It worked for about a decade. Borders Group peaked in 2003 with 1,249 stores trading as Borders and Waldenbooks, a mix of superstores, mall shops, airport outlets and Borders Express units, with locations in the United Kingdom, Singapore and Australia as well. Roughly 750 of those were small Waldenbooks stores in American malls.
Why did Borders hand its website to Amazon?
In 2001 Borders decided that running an online bookstore was someone else's job. It signed a deal that turned borders.com into a storefront operated by Amazon, which handled the catalog, the checkout and the customer data.
The arrangement ran until 2008. For seven years, a Borders customer who went looking for a book online was handed to the company that would eventually take the business.
Barnes & Noble spent those same years building its own site, and in 2009 its own e-reader. Amazon had launched the Kindle in 2007. Borders did not open an e-bookstore of its own until July 2010, and that one ran on Kobo rather than on anything Borders built.
The rest of the floor plan was a second bet going the same way. Borders superstores devoted large areas to CDs and DVDs, which made sense in 1999 and was dead weight by 2008. The leases on those buildings had been signed for a shopper who would buy a book, a CD and a DVD in one trip, and when music and video moved to downloads a large share of that floor space stopped earning while the rent stayed.
How fast did the collapse actually happen?
Borders Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on February 16, 2011 and said it would close about a third of its stores while it hunted for a buyer or a lender willing to fund a turnaround.
Neither showed up. On July 18, 2011 the company asked the court for permission to liquidate the 399 stores still trading, a decision that ended 10,700 jobs. What was left by then shows how far the mall business had fallen: 259 Borders superstores, 114 Borders Express and Waldenbooks shops, and 26 airport outlets, down from roughly 750 Waldenbooks stores eight years earlier.
Borders Group president Mike Edwards put the failure in two sentences in the July 2011 announcement. "Following the best efforts of all parties, we are saddened by this development," he said, adding that "the rapidly changing book industry, eReader revolution, and turbulent economy" had brought the company to that point.
Going-out-of-business sales began that month. The original Ann Arbor shop, known inside the company as Borders No. 1, closed in September, and the last American Borders stores shut on September 18, 2011, five months short of the chain's 40th anniversary in its home town.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Borders still around in 2026?
Borders is not around in the United States. Borders Group filed for Chapter 11 in February 2011, liquidated the last 399 stores that summer and closed its final American locations on September 18, 2011. Borders-branded shops still trade in the Gulf under Al Maya Group, which bought lifetime rights to the name in the Middle East in 2015.
Who owns the Borders name now?
Barnes & Noble has owned the Borders name in the United States since 2011, when it paid $13.9 million at a September bankruptcy auction for the Borders, Waldenbooks and Brentano's trademarks, the internet domains and a database of 48 million Borders customers. Barnes & Noble itself has been owned by Elliott Investment Management since 2019, and it has never reopened a store under the Borders name.
What happened to Waldenbooks?
Waldenbooks was the mall bookstore chain Kmart bought in 1984 and brought under Borders Group in 1992. It had about 750 American mall stores in 2003 and 114 Borders Express and Waldenbooks shops left by the July 2011 liquidation, which closed all of them. The Waldenbooks trademark has belonged to Barnes & Noble since that year.