Red Group went into voluntary administration yesterday, meaning that Borders, Whitcoulls, Bennetts and Angus and Robertson stores hang in limbo.
I seriously hope that Red Group had incompetant management, as otherwise, we may not have bookstores on our streets for much longer. We all know that the likes of Amazon take a decent chunk of market share, have lower overheads, and avoid us paying GST. But, we all also like spending time in bookstores, even if only to find books that we'd later buy online.
At the end of the day, bricks and mortar book stores do not have a lot of room to move in terms of becoming more profitable - the building, staff and stocking are non-negotiable. If anything, they need to stock everything, as you wouldn't get a store to order a book in when you can have it delivered to your door for half the price yourself.
With the changes in the industry, I do see paperbacks becoming less common (an ebook is almost as good as a cheap paperback for the latest novel), but there will always be a place for a hardcover non-fiction book. Only thing is, are we going to pay even more through the nose for them? Are we going to lose bookstores from our main streets, and end up with the odd specialist bookstore that sells everything, but at a price (like my favourite bookstore, Boffins Bookstore in Perth).
At the end of the day, I think ultimately the consumer will lose - this is the price we pay for low prices. We shouldn't have the option of under-paying for cut price service, while at the same time consuming full-service for free but not paying for it (lets face it, how many of us don't go into bookstores to browse, despite buying online).
In the meantime, it's nice to see that those persons holding gift vouchers have the chance to get some value back, they can be redeemed with assuming you purchase something twice their face value. That's pretty good considering the adminstrators could choose to not honour them, as they are mere unsecured creditors in the eye of the law.
