I see from the paper that Borders and A&R have collapsed here in Australia following the collapse of Borders in the US the other week. In the story it is all attributed to the fall in discretionary spending because of our relatively depressed economic conditions but I fear that is not it at all. We are living in the age of Amazon where books can be ordered and almost immediately delivered cheaper and sooner than they can be found in the local shop.
But with Kindle and other versions of e-books now spreading like wildfire, the book itself is becoming an endangered species.
On the weekend just past one of my favourite second hand bookshops also announced that it was about to shut and was having a 50% off sale. Since I typically buy everything that I truly want, I didn’t think it was really worth the bother to go. But you know how it is with those downward sloping demand curves so I ended up with another fourteen volumes to try to fit into my library at home.
We used to talk about buggy whips in class to describe how the new will displace the old – is there a single student left who knows what a buggy whip is? – but it is the strangest idea that in a generation a book may be as rare as a buggy whip. Kindle 9.1 will be an amazing piece of technology and the competition in this area means that what we see today is as technologically advanced as the World War I biplanes were in comparison with what was to come.
Kindle or not, I am still wedded to that old technology. I still like books and I love book shops. The surprise in finding things that I did not know existed and picking up a stray title that begins a new direction for my reading are great pleasures. And as true as this is in any book store, it is even more true in a second hand shop. With Kindle and Amazon, you buy what you are looking for. It won’t be as good but there is no going back.
Meanwhile my patiently brought together library of rare economic tracts and the rest has collapsed in value. None of it was bought with resale in mind but I did hope that they would all go to a good home one day. There is no stopping progress even when progress makes you worse off than you were before.
I’ve spent US$210 including P&H at Amazon in the last fortnight. I bought 8 books and the complete Deadwood box set for US$63. Why the hell would you not use Amazon?
Infidel Tiger
18 Feb 11 at 12:06 am
What role the retention of parallel import restrictions, which with the strong dollar has prevented local book retailers importing far cheaper versions of locally published books from overseas.
The GST is nothing relative to the price ramping effects of those regulations, which have left locally retailed books vastly uncompetitive against direct imports via the internet.
Ironically, Borders/A&R supported retention of the restrictions, shooting themselves in the foot as it has transpired. So did the Australian Booksellers’ Association, to the ultimate detriment of their members, it seems.
Levikman
18 Feb 11 at 12:22 am
As IT says, this is not really a sign of progress, it’s a sign of increased competition.
The reason that A+R and Borders can’t sell books anymore is simply because their prices are too high. If more industries allowed internet competition, the Australian ripoff versions would also go broke.
Prices in Australia in general are too high when compared to the salaries and prices elsewhere in the world. This was always going to happen.
Yobbo
18 Feb 11 at 12:51 am
I have the solution.
Let’s impose a tax on all Amazon purchases.
/ALP
C.L.
18 Feb 11 at 1:04 am
The reason that A+R and Borders can’t sell books anymore is simply because their prices are too high.
It is true that prices are higher than in many other places. But too high for what? If the prices were artificially inflated, then the logical respond of the retailer would be to cut prices. However apparently that’s not viable, given Australia’s minimum wage (one of the highest in the world), shop space rental costs and transportation costs.
Of course the fact that financially unrelated US Borders filed on the same day suggests a deeper reason. I heard recently that Barnes & Noble find lease of life via ebooks. Borders made many mistakes, like outsourcing the online sales to amazon (I think). And when they bought it back they had so much debt they couldn’t invest in ebooks etc.
I am not sure there is any future for physical bookshops.
Boris
18 Feb 11 at 3:23 am
Yes, the deeper reason being that their online competitors sell a much wider range of the same product for lower prices.
Yobbo
18 Feb 11 at 6:04 am
Yobbo, the brick and mortar stores here also have to contend with the stupid rule that says that they can’t import books published overseas (even though you can) which doesn’t help matters.
Quentin George
18 Feb 11 at 6:57 am
As I recall, Angus & Robertson / Borders argued to the Productivity Commission’s inquiry into parallel importation of books that they should be able to source books internationally rather than buy from local publishers. The campaign against the parallel importation of books by publishers and some writers has backfired.
Samuel J
18 Feb 11 at 7:07 am
Exactly.
Quentin George
18 Feb 11 at 7:14 am
This has wider implications for retailing and owner/operators of large shopping complexes must be worried. Which retailer wants to move into a large shopping complex and pay ridiculous amounts of rent when growing numbers of customers are buying online.
Sid Vicious
18 Feb 11 at 7:52 am
I still wish Amazon could deliver quicker. However waiting is easier than visiting a store.
TerjeP
18 Feb 11 at 8:20 am
Bolt:
daddy dave
18 Feb 11 at 8:26 am
A&R had a crumy book selection as well.
Adrian
18 Feb 11 at 8:34 am
There will be fewer bookshops, but there will still be bookshops. Like Steve, I see traditional books as a distinct product which online technologies only replace in the conveying text dimension.
It’s not surprising that Borders is first to go, given their strategy of pricing above recommended retail at just the time when major price-cutters became popular.
Terje – The problem is the US Mail, not Amazon. Use a UK online seller and the books usually arrive in a week or so.
Andrew Norton
18 Feb 11 at 8:41 am
I don’t think physical books will go the way of the buggy whip. I doubt ebooks will even replace physical books as the main earners when you account for the future effects of piracy.
AJ
18 Feb 11 at 8:43 am
AJ;
Amazon have already reported that Kindle books are now their largest selling items by volume.
Jacques Chester
18 Feb 11 at 8:54 am
That’s because people who tend to shop on Amazon would be more inclined to be early adopters. Are the majority of people who buy books now buying them primarily through Amazon? i doubt that. I don’t. For me the hassle of buying through Amazon is I have to pick the book up at the post office since I live in an apartment building.
I still like the physical look and feel of books and unlike Terje who doesn’t like visiting stores, visiting them is for me a benefit rather than a cost. I tend to make a lot of impulse and serendipitious purchases and many of these have tended to unearth gems for me. I’ve discovered lots of new writers and areas of interest through browsing.
Count me as an arch-reactionary in personal preference when it comes to books and most copyrighted products (I’ve never downloaded stuff through torrent or wherever the hell people get stuff either)
jtfsoon
18 Feb 11 at 9:05 am
Remember when CD’s came out. People still thought vinyl would have a place. I’ve still got my vinyl collection from 20 years ago but I don’t own a record player. Same thing happening to CD’s now. Books will gradually go the same way.
Andy
18 Feb 11 at 9:13 am
I sometimes spend hours browsing through small bookshops – I love it. It’s a great shopping experience – albeit expensive. I’ll usually walk out with 1-2 linear feet of books if the shop is any good.
Whilst I can see the benefits of the Kindle, and I buy quite a bit from Amazon, a big part of the experience for me is browsing quietly for an hour or two with other book fiends. To hell with the cost.
boy on a bike
18 Feb 11 at 9:14 am
I went browsing through Newtown with a mate on the weekend. We ended up in a record shop that sells vinyl. My mate is buying vinyl again – he loves the tactile nature of it. The shop had a number of record players for sale, and was well patronised. It’s a niche market, but buyers still exist. It was too cool for school.
boy on a bike
18 Feb 11 at 9:16 am
I am confident that I have now been adequately conditioned by PCs and the Web – though some/many Cattallaxians, may still insist I sound off me tits, depending on the degree of vilgilance the issue excites this morning – to embrace the new book technologies, IF they tick all the right boxes. I’m sorry, but compared to a book, a 2011 kindle is a Leyland P-76.
Peter Patton
18 Feb 11 at 9:20 am
The difference between CDs and the Kindle is that regular old books can do something the kindle can’t, whereas CDs were superior to Vinyl fin every way (except for DJ scratching on a turntable – for which vinyl 45s are still produced).
Until a kindle can run on solar power and cost $0, there will be a market for paper books.
Yobbo
18 Feb 11 at 9:33 am
Until a kindle can run on solar power and cost $0, there will be a market for paper books.
They won’t cost zero, but the price will collapse.
JC.
18 Feb 11 at 9:36 am
One habit, I doubt I’ll ever for a long time yet; and that is not trusting the notes I make online compared to the notes, texta highslights, and coda, I use on the paper, which I still far without doing.
Peter Patton
18 Feb 11 at 9:47 am
Don’t get me wrong Jason. I can enjoy browsing the shelves in a book store if I don’t have kids in tow. I just lack the necessary discretionary time to do it much. Whilst I can shop at Amazon at 2am.
I’d get a Kindle except that lots of the books I find interesting are not available on the Kindle.
TerjeP
18 Feb 11 at 10:24 am
The Kindle is the best medium to date; the light, bookmarking, dictionary are first rate.
I thought as recently as one year ago that I would never succumb to reading my books on a Kindle.
That has since changed so quickly for me that I am reading 90% of everything electronically. Newspapers, books, blogs to name a few. Spreading the newspaper out on the table and reading it front to back has pretty well gone forever.
It was the same with music only a few years ago. The listening now is mainly through earphones.
Hubert East
18 Feb 11 at 11:00 am
I have tried to read on the iPad, but always get distracted and use it to go back to the internet instead.
steve from brisbane
18 Feb 11 at 11:21 am
A kindle looks pretty stupid on a book case. Think I’ll stick to books.
Infidel Tiger
18 Feb 11 at 11:22 am
Not correct in terms of sound reproduction (other than eliminating noise from dust and/or damage). Digital music loses parts of the original waveforms of a sound in the sampling process so can seem much “flatter” than an analog recording.
badm0f0
18 Feb 11 at 12:19 pm
Parallel importing laws are stupid but did they really cause the collapse of Borders? They collapsed in the states as well. It’s online stores like Amazon that have done them in, surely.
TimT
18 Feb 11 at 12:35 pm
Are you able to read an e-book in different formats yet? Are Kindle and iPad able to handle poetry? What about cross-border copyright restrictions?
The great advantage of the physical book is, once you have it, you don’t have to worry about any of these things – what system you use, what copyright restrictions there are, and so on. The printed book is a supremely simple, elegant product, and I think it might be quite a while before the range of electronic books on offer now get all their problems sorted out. So I’m not worried about the future of the printed word just yet.
TimT
18 Feb 11 at 12:42 pm
I struggle to see what the point is of all these computer-based devices like iPads, Kindles, etc, anyway. Isn’t the point of a computer is that it is able to do *everything*? So why have different computer-devices then? It’s not as if they’re going to be able to do different everythings. Really, how are they going to compete with one another? Just by appearing to be more fashionable than the previous model? The book will outlast them all.
TimT
18 Feb 11 at 12:53 pm
Best thing about the kindle etc is the ability to use a bigger font – great for oldies who struggle to read small print without a magnifying glass. Biggest users funnily enough should be pensioners who are sick of looking for books printed in large text.
On the upside, am looking forward to a massive liquidation sale.
Boy on a bike
18 Feb 11 at 3:41 pm
I quite like books too, but lately what I’ve realised is that my only fondness is for them is to look at and sometimes heft. Otherwise they just sit there taking up space and make moving house a lot harder. In my kindle I have > 100 books on hand. At home I have a few hundred volumes in my room.
I intend to sell all the novels to secondhand places before the Kindle begins to strangle those stores too. I will probably have to throw my old textbooks away (I already culled some before leaving Perth — it was extremely distressing).
Jacques Chester
18 Feb 11 at 4:10 pm
Why the hell would you not use Amazon?
Because Book Depository is better and cheaper.
Rococo Liberal
18 Feb 11 at 5:01 pm
Jason is such a bloody Colonel Blimp!
Rococo Liberal
18 Feb 11 at 5:02 pm
I download shit and end up paying for stuff I like. If I don’t like it I pretty much junk it.
.
18 Feb 11 at 5:14 pm
I hadn’t heard of Book Depository until today. I’ll give it a whirl.
Infidel Tiger
18 Feb 11 at 5:14 pm
Just looked at The Book Depository too. They also sell through Amazon. Just bought a book today, $25 plus $13P&H = $38 total, from them through Amazon. If I’d just gone to their website would have saved P&H as they have free worldwide delivery. Ah, the humanity.
dover_beach
18 Feb 11 at 5:27 pm
“Until a kindle can run on solar power and cost $0, there will be a market for paper books.”
The Kindle software does cost $0, just download onto your computer, phone or ipad and I guess you could recharge your device with solar power if you like.
Presumably though the solar power would cost a shipload, no doubt there is a Gillard government subsidy for solar powered ebook readers.
rob
18 Feb 11 at 5:33 pm
“Are you able to read an e-book in different formats yet? Are Kindle and iPad able to handle poetry? What about cross-border copyright restrictions?”
Ipads have readers for all the different ebook formats eg kindle, adobe, borders, B&N.
The great advantage of an ebook is you can carry hundreds of them on your phone, or whatever device. With kindle books (on kindle or ipad) you can read the first chapter before you decide to buy or not.
rob
18 Feb 11 at 5:47 pm
Ipads have readers for all the different ebook formats eg kindle, adobe, borders, B&N.
Not convinced Rob, sorry – the number of competing formats will only increase. And some digital formats aren’t even able to get the most basic poetry format right:
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/11/21/the-woeful-kindle-part-two/
TimT
18 Feb 11 at 6:14 pm
I have switched to using Book Depository for all fiction writing. It’s much cheaper than Amazon and for most books about half the price of corresponding books sold in Australia. And post free.
I brought 3 packerback novels for my son last week for $54 Australian. They cost $90 in Australia. Moreover retailers in Australia typically don’t have in the books you want – they order them for you but you can do that yourself and avoid the Aussie margins. BD is a no brainer.
Often books I order from BD arrive 7 days after I order them. Fantastic.
Like Chester I have started to sell off or throw away the novels I have in hard copy that I buy on Kindle or IPad. Saves space – you can download them to either platform and take hundreds of books away with you while travelling for the weight of a paperback.
It might take a bit of time but the published book will soon go the way of the dinosaur. The environment will be improved and we will have better access to a huge range of reading at vastly lower cost.
I also find that Amazon UK supplies DVDs and Blue-rays very cheaply. I bought 12 Polanski classics for about $120 from Amazon UK. The local video store had two Polanski titles in total! Why bother? Its not much more expensive and much more convenient bto buy the lot online. When you are finished – give them to friends.
hc
18 Feb 11 at 6:16 pm
“Ipads have readers for all the different ebook formats eg kindle, adobe, borders, B&N.
Not convinced Rob, sorry – the number of competing formats will only increase. And some digital formats aren’t even able to get the most basic poetry format right:”
Don’t get me wrong Tim it’s not like I don’t like books, the main thing the iPad offers is convenience. The things I don’t like about books are: the australian copyright arrangements, the time it takes for a book to get here from os, & paying for freight. The iPad can avoid this, in addition some publishers provide electronic access to all of their titles by subscription. Waiting for seconds v weeks, with the benefits of cheaper makes it a better experience.
Rob
18 Feb 11 at 8:52 pm
I like Abe Books for second hand books.
daddy dave
18 Feb 11 at 10:56 pm
If they make a waterproof Kindle I’ll buy one in a second. Reading by the pool or in the pool on holiday will be transformed.
Infidel Tiger
18 Feb 11 at 11:00 pm
“If they make a waterproof Kindle I’ll buy one in a second. Reading by the pool or in the pool on holiday will be transformed.”
IT, there are waterproof covers for iPhones for use when swimming. Not sure how you swim & phone at the same time? Anyway, load kindle books on to iPhone in waterproof cover & there you have it.
Rob
18 Feb 11 at 11:27 pm
Yes, indeed, is the thought of my painstakingly collected and beloved library with no home to go to that breaks my heart too.
Cath
18 Feb 11 at 11:58 pm
I’m hoping the type of place that will survive is something like Gertrude and Alice in Bondi. I only buy a book on about half my visits, but even if I don’t buy a book, I still end up handing over cash for cake and coffee. Their cakes are excellent by the way.
boy on a bike
19 Feb 11 at 7:50 am
I’ll tell you what will survive – coffee table books.
Infidel Tiger
19 Feb 11 at 10:09 am
IT – the horror, the horror.
Boy on a bike
19 Feb 11 at 11:14 am