Everyone’s in a lather this morning over the collapse of REDgroup retail, the owner of Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson. To insiders, this was not a surprise.
So what contributed to the demise … bad management on the part of the PEP group, the role of parallel importation, the strong dollar, e-books?
Speak to independent observers and they’ll tell you a little from column A, a little from column B.
And what does this ultimately mean for the future of Australian book publishing and book retail? What’s the greatest challenge they face?
It’s the answer posed to a multitude of questions that extend beyond the book industry, the music industry and retail in general, it goes beyond Harvey Norman tantrums, extends across politics, power and business, it crosses artificial borders, cuts across the way we communicate, congregate, buy and sell.
As Guy Rundle wrote yesterday, “It’s part of a more radical shift in the whole nature of space and social life that is occurring due to the spread of online existence, and one whose radical impact we have barely begun to reflect on.”
Yes, that’s right, it’s … the internet.
Maybe Mirko Bagaric was onto something …
Why a book?? I love books and own many. When at a loose end, there is noting like a good book. Sometimes – I say to myself – ‘I will read a book today’ – it may take until tomorrow to finish – and if it is so good:
I re-read it after a few months after a couple of frinds and my daughters have finished – it has paid for itself already!!
Yes, I download books, but hated them both. If they had been books, they would have gone back to the bookshop to exchange for another, a privilege – which as a book-buyer – I have earned.. I trust my bookshop and the learned opinions of their staff – while reading book reviews – so many, many book reviews means little. – except to make a list to consider.
I always thought Midnight’s Children the best book I had ever read – and it won the Booker’s Booker – so to trust one’s own judgement proves to be the best – especially when your judgement tells you to take this one back for another. Yesterday I took back $39 worth and left having spent $89!
JCherself
Viva la book shop
Look what happens when slick business types borrow a mountain of money, buy companies they know little about, and then, try to run them like supermarkets i.e. as if books are potatoes.
It ain’t the internet, it’s a big dose of corporate stupidity, and they’ve trashed one of the iconic names in Australian publishing.
Shameful.
Give me the The Wire DVD box set any day. You can’t see pictures in prose. You can’t hear books, let alone profound film scores like that on Michael Clayton the other night.
What I find amusing is skinny Bob Carr the thespian spinner, embracing the web now, when as premier in NSW he refused to make accessible for comparision and accountability, his ministers’ and premiership press releases.
This recently revealed online embrace by Carr while on the board of at risk Dymocks book sellers? Spin getting in front of an impending collapse of that chain also? Time will tell.
As his NSW ALP regime collapses in on itself, I can’t help reflecting how ‘greenie’ Bob Carr repealed 30 year old environmental legislation for huge swathes of publicly owned forest on the NSW south coast 10 years ago, and even had some peak green trusties sign up to that travesty. A forested coast that has been smashed by a million tonnes of woodchips a year into a mega fire tinder box of dry schlerophyll regrowth. 130 truckloads a day. Beware the nostalgia for Carr’s leadership in the next 4 weeks. An online non sequitur.