After 40 years in the book business, Borders, the nation’s second-largest bookseller, was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Additionally, the store announced their intention to close nearly 200 of their 642 stores in the coming weeks. This has us at USDemocrazy wondering…what’s next for the American bookstore?

We’re not the only ones curious about the future of the book market. Borders’ announcement shook the publishing industry from top to bottom, but it didn’t exactly come as a surprise.

The book retailing industry is very challenging right now…We’ve had significant transformation. Bookstores have gradually been losing their prominence, and the U.S. market is oversaturated in terms of the number of retail stores. So that trend will likely continue as e-books gain more prevalence in the market.”

There it is, the term publishing companies have come to despise and fret over in recent years…”e-books.”

As companies like Apple follow the model established by Amazon’s Kindle,  the fear is the digitization of literature will have as much of an impact on the book industry as it did with music and the record business (you remember record stores, right?).

For Borders, this wasn’t quite the case.  While e-books might have played a part in the company’s deterioration they didn’t act alone. A number of factors have been named as contributors to the overall downfall.

Ill-fated expansion plans, too many stores that lose money and being late to realize the popularity of electronic books.”

If traditional bookstores can keep up with their digital competitors they might be able to survive in this environment, but it’s hard to say for how long.