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Originally Posted by sabredog
Now blaming online shopping for their demise.
There is a connection to made regarding this. Their range and prices have been pretty bad. But it is their fault in the main as the bookstores were right at the forefront of continuing import restrictions and have been slow with ebook rollout.
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I remember all the hullaballoo about allowing parallel importation, and I had the very strong impression that the majority of bookstores were
in favour of opening up the market. In particular, it was Dymocks that campaigned strongly for this. One reason that was given was that they were aware that online orders were eating into their profits, and if they could import foreign editions and provide them cheaply, then they could counter that loss. (I'd certainly pay a couple more dollars to buy a pbook in person rather than buy from the Book Depository. Just not $15+.) It was the local publishing industry as well as some Australian authors that were against the revocation of import restrictions, one of their objections being that said bookstores would then flood the market with cheap and remaindered works by overseas authors, neglecting to support local authors.
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Do any Australians buy ebooks from Australian retailers? Myself and everyone I know buy their ebooks from offshore (mostly Amazon and Kobobooks), I had never even considered buying ebooks locally.
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I bought ebooks from Borders AU, mainly works by Aussie authors. Borders did have quite a few local works not sold by Kobo or Amazon. IIRC, one of Border's publicity releases had boasted of how they had signed ebook distribution deals with every major publishing house in Australia.