Thoughts on Borders/Angus and Robertson

So yesterday, the news came through in Australia/NZ that RedGroup Retail, the largest booksellers in Australia, were going into liquidation.

I've read a bit, watched last night's Lateline program (here) and so far my conclusion is – this is a mess and it's just the beginning.

There's so many aspects to this. First is the stores themselves. I was really excited when an A&R opened here in Queanbeyan – great, a bookstore just five minutes away! Then I started going down and I couldn't find the books I wanted. They'd only carry books already assured of being sellers, or by names. I've now gone into several A&R stores, and I've noticed that in the company owned stores this is a real issue (Note – the franchise operated stores appeared to have much more flexibility and choice and thus better stocking).

My favourite bookstore in Canberra has become Borders. I've never had issues finding books I want there, it's always busy and buzzing and from the author standpoint they've been extremely supportive of me.

But overall, I have to say that the stores didn't stock well, they didn't sell well and books aren't just a normal retail item – they're more about a relationship than anything else.

Then there's the online thing and in Australia I think it's still more about online selling than e-books cause while they're taking off, it's not to the same extent as America yet. Paypal have said that in the past twelve months, online purchases from Australia have increased 70%. With the Australian dollar hovering around parity with the US, that's not surprising. Even with postage, it often turns out cheaper to buy from Amazon then Australian online retailers. Then there's free postage from places like The Book Depository. There's no doubting that it's impacted brick and mortar retailers.

My answer to that was that bookstores then have to work on building the business beyond just selling – create the relationship I mentioned earlier. Except on the Lateline program, the owner of Gleebooks (major independent bookseller in Sydney) said that with the advent of Google, the position of bookseller as point of information has declined. People can find out what they need to know and where to get that information themselves.

A comment I've seen online is about independent bookstores making themselves part of the community to survive. Maybe that's the answer.

Then Lateline talked about the impact of major chains like KMart and Big W, who now account for a third of booksales in Australia. The problem for me as an author is these chains generally will only carry people who are a name (although there are exceptions – Kirstyn McDermott's debut Madigan Mine ended up in the local KMart).  Go there and you're seeing Bryce Courtney and Nora Roberts and Stephanie Meyer and JK Rowling and not a lot of diversity. So we don't want them to end up taking over the physical bookselling in Australia.

And THEN people have brought up parallel importing and the impact it's had with booksellers not being able to import cheaper books. When I think about Angus and Robertson and how they had massive tables of cheap books they'd bought in through remainders and stuff, I wonder if that's the argument people think it is.

Finally, there's the costs of books in Australia and yeah, they're high and something needs to be done.  It's been said some booksellers are blaming publishers for not responding to the dollar pressure and dropping the costs of books in Australia, but then maybe because of the structure of the industry it wasn't possible. Particularly in publishing, which has always been a low-profit industry.

The conclusion – the publishing and bookselling industry is seeing an upheaval and I'm not sure that any of us know what the final result is going to be. I'm finding it hard to put aside my self-interest in all this – I want to be paid to write books and I want people to buy my books. How do I do that, while other people get the things they want – viable businesses, reasonably priced books.

Perhaps the business model for us writers is going to change – perhaps we'll be staring out electronically, building our name and audience and only the biggest and brightest will get actual physical print runs. A shame – I'll miss not having my actual book to hold (although emailing an electronic copy to contest winners will be a HELL of a lot cheaper than mailing physical copies).

The sad thing right now is that there are currently 2500 people out there who are suddenly unsure about what their employment situation is going to look like in a month or so. To them, I say – best of luck. I hope this ends up being a situation that moves you into a new and happy phase of your life and not one that makes things difficult for you.