Carolyn Webb
February 13, 2012
The Age
AFTER a gloomy 2011, local booksellers are reporting improved sales and more shop openings than closures.
Collins Booksellers opened stores in Moonee Ponds and Fountain Gate in November and Reader’s Feast relaunched in Collins Street in December.
December book sales at Readings’ five Melbourne stores were up 13 per cent on the previous year. Farrell’s Bookshop in Mornington reported that both 2011 Christmas quarter sales and January 2012 sales were up 30 per cent.
Still, the trade is hardly booming, but Susanne Horman is striding ahead, opening a new general-interest bookshop in Greensborough. Greensborough Plaza’s two former mainstream bookshops, Collins and Angus & Robertson, closed last year.
With the launch of Robinsons Bookshop on March 1, Ms Horman will be the canary in the mine – do locals want a bookshop or are they content with department store pop fiction and cookbooks?
Her shop, just inside the plaza, is at further risk because it reverts to the old-fashioned ”corner store” type.
Australian Booksellers Association chief executive Joel Becker said the chain bookstore had been the shopping-centre norm. But the collapse of Borders and many Angus & Robertson stores had left gaps. And centres keen to fill them.
Robinsons is the first outstation of the original Robinsons – started in 1963 in Frankston.
Greensborough Plaza manager Stan Crinis said the top customer inquiry in the past six months had been, ”Where’s the bookshop?”
He has seen Robinsons in Frankston, with its lamp lighting, lounges and wooden shelves, and believes the new outlet will be ”a shop with personality, which is what I think we need”.
Ms Horman, a single mother of two, says a ”disconnection with community” as a market research executive led her to follow her passion for literature and buy Robinsons, in Station Street, Frankston, five years ago.
She now feels ”embraced” by it. She loves helping book clubs find novels to review, hosting author talks and mingling with artists.
”Our whole front doorway is full of notices from what’s going on in the area; we’ll take that to Greensborough,” she said.
She says chain bookshops often failed because they were overlit, treated customers like cash cows and sold populist books that ironically catered to a small, occasional reader market. They neglected the ”real readers” who read voraciously but wanted intelligent staff and a wide choice.
Bookshops should be vibrant community hubs. ”Everyone’s so busy and I think it’s really sad if people end up shopping on the internet and getting parcels delivered to their house, and they don’t get out and meet people with similar interests.
”And a lot of that happens in a bookshop. People get a chance to talk about things they love, and it’s great.”
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