Future of bookselling

Publishers have abandoned New Zealand. Penguin merged with Random House and moved to Australia, Macmillan, Harper Collins, Hachette (Hodder and Stoughton in my time) have all closed their operations in New Zealand, moved to Australia and distribute books to New Zealand booksellers from there. This makes books in New Zealand unnecessarily expensive because it introduces an other layer of distribution costs, and greatly limits the books that are readily available to bookshops in New Zealand. The sky is falling, bookshops are dying, Amazon is taking over the world. But I, being long in the tooth, have seen it all before. In the 1970s the Booksellers Assn of NZ, lead by Roy Parsons, fought two great battles: the end of the net book agreement, the trade agreement that ensured that all books were sold at the same price wherever they were sold, and so made sure that the playing fields were level for all booksellers no matter how small or distant, and closed markets, which gave the right to publishers to supply books exclusively from their New Zealand distribution centres. The end of the net book agreement put large booksellers and chains at a great advantage, because they could negotiate special terms and get competitive advantage over their small rivals. Some of the small bookshops that were so disadvantaged were among the best bookshops in New Zealand if not in the world. Overseas visitors were amazed to find excellent bookshops in places like Marton, Fielding, Levin, Blenheim and many other small towns. Closing the markets, distributing books from New Zealand distribution centres greatly limited the range of books available. If you wanted a book outside the range of highly promoted best sellers you had to wait for a long time and pay an exorbitant price. Now that publishers virtually walked away from their closed markets, booksellers are presented with new opportunities and challenges. Instead of choosing from a limited range of books on offer, they can buy any book from any part of the world and get it within a few days. But selecting books will require booksellers to be well informed. They will have to keep up with whatever is published here and overseas, subscribe to The Bookseller, The Publishers' Weekly and read it every week, as I used to, read the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, get to know their customers and their interests, so that bookshops become market places for ideas, places where you would meet friends and talk about books, places where you could have interesting conversations with well informed booksellers. Bookshops that want to survive will have to focus on books and chuck out peripheral merchandise and remainders, stacks of failed books that no one wanted at full price, and will not be obsessed with prices, getting the cheapest on the market. No one would want to buy a book because it is cheap. They would want it because they are interested in it, or would want to it to give it to someone for whom it would be meaningful. The new challenges booksellers face also provide wonderful new opportunities. Book selling is still an interesting business, with all its challenges and rewards.