The collapse of REDgroup Retail led to the close of 139 Angus & Robertson and Borders stores, with many suburban areas left without a local bookshop. Crikey provides a rundown here. For people like me, who no longer live within reasonable distance from a bookstore, this means relying on online purchasing. But the online market has gone bizarro, too. Here's what's happened in online bookselling this year:
- Austalia's largest online bookstore, fishpond, has started outsourcing many purchases to warehouses overseas. While this means that a larger range of books is available, it also means that the customer has to wait much longer while the item is first shipped from the USA or the UK, and then shipped from fishpond's Sydney warehouse. This means it's just as cheap and much faster to order from overseas.
- Ferrier Hodgson, the administrator for REDgroup Retail, has sold the A&R and Borders online stores to Pearson Education. Pearson Education is a publisher, so this signals and unprecedented level of direct involvement in the book market by an Australian publisher.
- The Book Despository, the best option for buying books from overseas, has been bought by Amazon. This concerns me, because I think Amazon just might be the devil.
So where is one to buy a book? And what is going to happen to the book market? I suspect something big and different is going to happen over the next few years, but what it is I can't guess. Bookselling is a centuries old industry and things just haven't changed that fast until now.
In the meantime, these are the things I want to know:
- I want a local independent bookstore. Where's my local independent bookstore?
- Am I still going to get free shipping and my choice of non-Kindle ebooks on The Book Depository?
For those interested, by the way, I think I might start posting here again, though somewhat less regularly than I used to.
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