Are bookstores becoming a luxury?

 Just weeks after I started loading up my new Kindle with ebooks costing from $2.99 to $9.99 the Australian bookselling industry falls into serious trouble. 


On Thursday, Private Equity Partners’ RedGroup, which owns the 123 Angus and Robertson and 26 Borders bookstores around Australia, went into voluntary receivership. 


During my stroll down Hall Street I stopped short at the window display for Zabriskie’s, a long-time favourite bookstore formerly known as Martin Smith's Bookstore. There was 30 per cent off all books, which is usually enough to set my heart aflutter, but the reason cancels out any joy at the sale sign. It is closing down as well. I go inside and ask why. 


It's a mixture of things: people buying cheaper books online, especially with Australian dollar on parity with the US dollar, the high rents in Bondi, the lower mark-up on books compared to other items like clothes. This Bondi institution will be gone by March leaving the suburb without a new bookstore (the wonderful Gertrude & Alice sells second-hand books).

Curious about what's driving the end of bookstores I can't resist buying, ‘The book is dead. Long live the book’ by Sherman Young, a media lecturer at Macquarie University.

“Debates about the future of books are filled with red herrings. So, let’s be clear about a few things. Books as objects will not disappear overnight as new media forms tend to displace rather than replace older ones. So, printed books will be around for some time to come.”

The ability to buy cheaper GST-free books online and trade protections for local publishers which forces retailers to pay higher prices for locally produced books available at lower prices overseas were some of the reasons given by Red Group. 

But, as Michael Evans writes in the SMH on Saturday, Internet sales are only between 2 and 3 per cent of Australian retail sales. He thinks the problem lays elsewhere. 

“Private equity is facing a perfect storm: it bought high, it piled in cheap debt and now faces its day of reckoning as it exits its positions. That doesn’t have much to do with the Internet.”

Maybe not, but it leaves PEP with a lot to answer for in the cultural wasteland left behind in the demise of bookstores.