Once, there was a time when you had no other option than to buy a book from a bookstore. You’d have to leave the house and speak to those in the store, but it was a less than a troublesome experience. Today we can buy online and avoid the conversation about how the weather is outside. It’s in many ways more convenient to buy online but it is strangling the business of bookstores who find it hard to keep up with business of the much faster online store.
At heart I can’t stand the online business but there is a far better variety and it’s cheaper depending on where you look. Although if my local Angus & Robertson had what I needed, then at a reasonable price, I’d be right behind them. At the end of the tunnel there is a light for bookstores and that’s try making more sales online to get back in the competition. Primarily being that online bookstores can theoretically afford to drop their book prices due to less staff being involved and no rent being needed to pay for the store. The online world is an important battleground for retail in general. Myer is struggling online so they are giving free shipping with every online purchase. Like in a small town, you don’t want to lose out to a new store in town that are cheaper and prettier than you. Bookstores will need to find a way to survive. Online is likely the key.
Bookstores have lived many days and they probably foresaw many more days to come. Business Minister Nick Sherry shone light on the situation. "In five years, other than a few specialist booksellers in capital cities, we will not see a bookstore, they will cease to exist." As a bookstore owner I’d be feeling a sense of dread for my business. People who are told they have a certain time left to live don’t always die when predicted, their ailment sometimes just disappears. I feel bookstores, even small ones can survive. Adjusting to change is one way of challenging their demise. E-Books are increasing in popularity and bookstores need to make available plenty of them to purchase. I definitely prefer owning a book in physical form. Maybe it’s the smell or because it’s a book and books have pages attached to a spine with inked words through it. Reading from a screen has no charm to me, some love it though. The Australian dollar could also change giving a positive spin for the bookstore. Angus & Robertson in Launceston struggled financially and closed up shop, so other stores need to react quickly on how to respond to an unwanted trend. In the next five years a lot could happen. The internet could bust for whatever reason, taking shoppers back into the street. Who knows? I don’t, and Nick Sherry possibly doesn’t either.
The bookstore might be the beginning if Nick Sherry is right. If the bookshop disappears then other forms of print possibly will, the newspaper for instance. There is a vast variety of options for shopping online and before long clothes stores may cease to exist. Our malls may one day be filled with the skeletons of old stores as tumbleweed are blown through the centre of it all.
