An excellent piece on the collapse of REDgroup in Australia and New Zealand with New Zealand’s Whitcoulls as its primary focus. The Irish publishers (or indeed the Canadian, Austrian or any smaller market publisher with larger same-language neighbours) will find many of the notes ringing true.
Independent bookseller Hamish Wright says he understands the reasons for such moves, but laments that it sometimes means retailers are not able to respond to customer demand as quickly as they would like. Some New Zealand orders are now being given lower priority than those from Australia, he says, and some now take many days to arrive. In December in particular, delays can mean lost sales, he says. Or they may prompt customers to go online instead.
Independents insist their superior service and greater knowledge will continue to give them an edge over the chain stores. But with sales of e-readers slowly gathering momentum in New Zealand, and overseas sites such as Amazon and The Book Depository continuing to siphon off an unknown number of online sales, some believe that many bricks and mortar booksellers will struggle to remain viable.
Even Whitcoulls has been unable to match its competitors in online sales, despite the fact that it was one of the first to tackle what used to be called e-tailing with its aptly-titled FlyingPig website. More than a decade later, local websites such as Fishpond and MightyApe are believed to be well ahead of Whitcoulls in online sales.
via The bookshop that lost the plot – Books – NZ Herald News.
