Mom and pop might benefit from end of Borders

From the Bad News Is Good News File: Communities around the country have heard about the closure of Borders bookstores and wondered whether mom-and-pop booksellers, for years threatened by the megashops, could benefit.

Places like Jelly’s used bookstores and Kailua’s BookEnds could benefit from the lost souls, hungry for the touch and smell of bound paper, wandering in (neither company has much of a Web presence).

It all depends, of course, on how much the Borders failure is altogether the result of a migration away from printed books purchased locally and toward e-books and e-retailers like Amazon. If that’s the dominant trend, then days could be numbered for all bookstores.

Bad news, period.

Go east, young man, after going to Hawaii

It seems that most riders, walkers or runners with goals of stepping foot in every state end with Hawaii, but Max McManus of Reno, Nev., is going the opposite direction.

McManus began his bicycling trek in Alaska and arrived in Hawaii on Sunday as the beginning of his goal of covering 7,500 miles and 50 states in 50 days.

His west-to-east is easy to understand: He is to end his journey at Ground Zero in New York City on Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the terrorism attack, with $3 million in donations for 9/11 victims and family members.

McManus flew out of Honolulu Sunday afternoon and was scheduled to begin his mainland from the eastern tip of California to Las Vegas, driving his Trek 6.9 Madone bicycle about 150 miles per day.