The administrator for REDgroup Retail has announced today that the remaining Borders stores in Australia will close by the end of July. This will bring to an end the Borders presence in Australia, leave a hole in another nine shopping centres and present more opportunities for newsagents in the book space.
The closure of Borders will cause ripples across book retailing. It will make publishers and other suppliers more wary. It will also reinforce a subtle message about books in print.
One of the things I’d like to see as a positive in this situation, is that the smaller, independent bookstores will reclaim their niche and flourish again. Pity greed had to prevail first.
One has to wonder if the independent bookstores lobbying against opening up import restrictions on books for resale were thinking about this all along, how by opposing this they would eventually break the big chains as they could no longer compete with the online market…