T.B. CLARK BOOK BARGAINS PTY LTD, the company operating the All Books For Less retail group, has gone into external administration. Some stores are closed and some have already been taken over by other operators. This will be good news for newsagents located near All Books For Less outlets.
Stand alone book retailing is tough. There is an opportunity for books in newsagencies.
I understand there may also be some problems with Collins Booksellers in Victoria.
IMO the decision by the federal government not to remove parallel import restrictions on books has hurt domestic booksellers as consumers buy cheaper books from overseas sources like Amazon.
Remove those restrictions and let booksellers source books direct from overseas sources and then the domestic industry might have a chance to compete with Amazon
local book distributors and publishers have priced themselves out of the market. Books are just to expensive now, difficult to justify paying $35 for a plain jane novel, needs to be under the $20 mark. We are slowly reducing our books, we will continue with kids books as most are sub $15 and grandparents like to by them as gifts, also australiana type non fiction still doing ok if you can find the titles. Mainstream fiction just too hard, if a really hot title comes out like 50 Shades of Grey, its much cheaper to buy them from Kmart or Big W as always cheaper there than direct from publishers. We did that last time and did really well.
Unfortunately it is Kmart and Big W that are main ones that make it real hard for everyone else usually putting their new release books out for cheaper than we can buy them for. It is the race to the cheapest price that all smaller businesses can not compete with.$35 is not dear in the context of how many hours entertainment you get out of a good book when compared to a $10 2hour dvd