Borders Opens Up Free Wi-Fi

Borders has joined the free Wi-Fi club of bookstores, hoping to lure you in to browse and buy books, sip some coffee, and generally become a customer. Barnes & Noble has already made Wi-Fi available in their locations. Borders will be using Verizon for the connectivity.

This is all well and good, though it raises some interesting thoughts. With an eBook explosion about to happen, and with customers already able to download books from Amazon over the air (via the Whispernet service) will we see the brick and mortar stores promoting an opportunity to buy eBooks from their online store while you’re in the store? It almost seems like they have to do something like this to keep browsers from doing some shopping, then using a mobile device/eBook Reader to purchase from another source over the air.

I’m just curious.