Last week brought the news that the Borders chain of bookshops has gone into administration. I don’t see how anyone was surprised, since its downfall was caused by its own customers.

Borders was a browser’s paradise. Much has been made in the recent press of its emphasis on easy access to comfy chairs and coffee. With no one to tell you off for reading in the shop, who needed to buy a book when you could just treat the place like a trendy library? Many have pointed to this as a major factor in the chain’s demise but, to me, that’s what a bookshop is for.

My childhood Saturdays were often spent following my father around various bookshops in the city where we lived, and each time I would run to the Children’s section, pick up the book I was reading at home, and start where I had left off. And the same at the next bookshop. And the next, until sometimes I finished one book and started another (which would invariably come home with me too).

As an undergraduate, I was not the only Blackwell’s customer who took a literary criticism text off the shelf and up to the Café Nero to make notes when all the library copies were in use. I did buy books, of course, (and never spilled coffee on the ones I was merely road-testing) and the warmth of Blackwell’s atmosphere always made it my first choice of purchase place when I did so. I still feel there’s only so much time I can take abusing the goodwill of the bookseller before I pay for their kind shelter and take home a book (or several).

Do people always buy in Topshop? The giant Oxford Circus branch is designed so that shoppers needn’t come up for air all day. There are cafés, loos, nail bars, hairdressers, and more clothes, shoes and accessories than anyone could try on in a lifetime. Shopping in the 21^st century is (hasn’t it always been?) about the experience as much as the purchase.

Rather like clothes shopping when it is necessary to have a changing room to try on an outfit before buying, to see if it will fit, so is it crucial to have a taster of the book you are about to commit yourself to buying. So Borders should have encouraged its browsers – how else would they find their glass-slipper book that fit?

What is a bookshop? Is it a halfway house between a library and a coffee shop? Books hold people’s thoughts and feelings and emotions and bookshops are infused with all of that love and care. Necessarily, then, they are a public space in which to share the very, very private. A book holds infinite possibilities and adventures and mind-opening journeys into corners of the universe you could never have imagined before cracking its spine. Their shops are the gateways to this path of enlightenment and entertainment and they are empowering because they give you the chance to own the thoughts and feelings and journeys and ideas of others in a way that nothing else can. Tweeting is temporary, facebook updates fade, even in a library you have to give the book back, but from a bookshop you can walk away owning a piece of history, a piece of the future.

Even Borders’ name is (was) liminal, pointing to the very edge of reality you step up to when you cross the threshold of a bookshop, to be transported into the authors’ minds held inside the books there. The physical presence of books is key to the success of finding the right one, for you, right now. You are inspired by their look and feel in a way that can’t be replicated in the clinical click-through online bookshop. All your senses are involved in the selection process, rather than being narrowed to the online one.

I think browsing culture was one of Borders’ big success points, fostering loyalty and a love of books and bookshops – those who stepped inside to get out of the rain would invariably return and become regulars. But then, I actually buy books in bookshops. Too many of the in-store browsers would take advantage of the in-store research then go to their online browsers to buy it at a lower price.

This short-sightedness has contributed to Borders’ demise. To stop all bookshops from going under, book buyers need to be presented with the stark reality of their choices. How do you think a shop will survive if no one buys anything from it? It’s a simple economic equation – if people buy things from a shop, it can continue trading; if not, it can’t. So it’s up to you. If you value the bookshop, if it means anything to you, buy your books there, as well as having a coffee. And if you don’t, well, be prepared to take responsibility for its disappearance.