Mixing Pleasure Is Now a Business

Borders Books is now in the CD-burning business. At least that's the way it seemed last week when I walked into one of their stores and saw signs advertising their new make-your-own-CD service.

In a way, that didn't surprise me. CD sales have been down for quite a while and it could be that my generation will be the last one to actually go to the trouble of buying CDs instead of just downloading songs from the Internet.

Still it was odd to see a major seller of compact discs throw in the towel and say, “The heck with it. We can't really sell the bloody things like we used to, so let's make money burning the damn things.”

Of course, a lot of people have already been burning their own CDs for free long before this, so it's going to be interesting to see how long Borders keeps it up.

And whether it ends up becoming the next Hollywood Video.