Sally Sara: Book sales soared during the height of the pandemic when many Australians were in desperate search of a good read. But a major player in the industry has come crashing back to earth. The country’s biggest locally owned online bookseller, Booktopia, has gone into voluntary administration. And some local booksellers worry that it means more Australians are buying books via the big international firms such as Amazon. Angus Randall reports.
Angus Randall: Booktopia has been one of the biggest players in the Australian book market for nearly 20 years. It’s now in voluntary administration. Robbie Egan is the chief executive at BookPeople, the Australian booksellers association.
Robbie Egan: That is pretty dramatic withdrawal out of the supply chain in what is an instant. So, particularly for smaller Australian publishers and Australian writers who sell quite a big proportion of their books through that one channel, this is extremely worrying.
Angus Randall: You can still buy books from Booktopia as of this morning, but there’s significant uncertainty over its future. The online seller suffered a $16 million loss in the six months to December. It recently spent $12 million on a high-tech warehouse in Sydney’s inner west.
Robbie Egan: And it’s just a shame because Booktopia was a great Australian corporate story for a while there. And then, yeah, something went really amiss during COVID and clearly around their investment in infrastructure, they didn’t get it quite right. So they didn’t get the benefits of scale. Your unit costs have to come down. Clearly that didn’t happen to them. So we’ll find out over time, perhaps there was something wrong in their warehousing. Perhaps they were overstaffed. There’s a whole bunch of questions now.
Angus Randall: Administrators will now assess whether Booktopia can be restructured or sold. It shipped more than 6 million books last year. Robbie Egan expects a few local companies will have a think about taking at least its assets on board.
Robbie Egan: In speculation, I believe Dymocks are looking at it. I saw their chief executive quoted in the paper that they’d be mad not to look at it. So they have a pretty large online presence. There’s a large, not independent book chain called QBD. I imagine they would be considering looking at the assets themselves.
Angus Randall: Fiona Inglis is the managing director at Curtis Brown Literary Agents. She says in the meantime, book lovers shopping online are likely to send their money overseas.
Fiona Inglis: Look, unfortunately, I think they’ll probably go to the next option, which is Amazon. And we don’t really want Amazon to have a lot more business because they’re a huge multinational, global behemoth.
Angus Randall: It comes a year after UK-based bookseller Book Depository shut down. The site was bought by Amazon in 2011 and had a major following in Australia. Fiona Inglis says the troubles at Booktopia don’t signify a wider industry problem.
Fiona Inglis: Definitely about Booktopia. I don’t think people are buying fewer books. I mean, cost of living crisis has had an impact. There is a school of thought that’s, it’s always been around that in really tough times, people want to escape and they can escape into a book because they can’t afford to go to Greece. They can read about it. I don’t know whether that’s what we’re seeing at the moment, but I don’t think sales have been particularly yet really badly affected by cost of living crisis because it is a cheap form of entertainment.
Angus Randall: Western Australian author Michael Trant says his job is to write the books, not sell them, but he’s not too worried about physical books dying out.
Michael Trant: I was actually at a readers event a couple of weeks ago on the Gold Coast, there were about 100 or so readers there. Physical books are still very much alive. I’m not too worried about that at all. People are literally buying suitcases worth of books to take home on the plane.
Angus Randall: The first Booktopia creditors meeting will be held on July 15.
Sally Sara: That’s Angus Randall there.