Jul/090
Trouble at Borders Books?
If true, this is sad, distrubing and an ugly trend amongst the big box bookstores. There’s word that Borders Books is pressuring their employees to sign non-blogging contracts that essentially puts the kibosh on being able to comment publicly on any policies or procedures the chain puts into place. Stifling speech in this way seems to only have engendered hard feelings, from the sampling of posts on forums that Borders employees use. Whether or not this is a policy that is an offshoot of some previously agreed to non-disclosure agreement, it isn’t yet clear, but the troubled bookseller would probably do well to learn the lesson that openness can be more useful during the hard times than trying to regulate speech.
Again, this is all hearsay until someone obtains a copy of the agreement in question. Still, the evidence is there that something is amiss. In the social media world we all dwell in, a few attempts to evangelize the company on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and so on could go a long way to building a customer base, as the post author argues convincingly.