Much of the news coverage surrounding Borders/A&R/Whitcoulls going into voluntary administration has focused on the woes of booksellers facing the triple threat of e-readers, deep discounting from off-shore online retailers and a strong Australian dollar.  With this in mind, we were interested to see an article in The Age on Friday about Readings, the Melbourne-based independent bookstore that has been trading in Carlton since 1969.

When a Borders store opened up directly across the street from Readings in 2001 it struck alot of people that this was the beginning of the end for the independent book seller. (Many of my friends from Uni at the time even embarked upon an extended shoplifting spree at Borders “in protest”. Students, eh?)

Staff working there recall a thick sense of gloominess pervading their spirits. ”It was like our business was going to be halved and we were all going to lose our jobs,” said former sales clerk Adam Carey, now an Age reporter. ”But it never panned out that badly. I’d come to believe that there was room enough for both businesses.”

So… why has Readings continued to prosper as Borders struggles?

Like many other small stores across the world, Readings have realised that they can’t necessarily compete with the online giants on range or on price. In fact, most of their books are sold at RRP, which in extreme cases is as much as double the price of some of their online competitors and often a few dollars more than at the at the Borders store across the road.

Instead, Readings have positioned themselves not so much as a vast, aeroplane hangar sized repository of books so much as a dedicated band of fellow book lovers.

They don’t try to sell every book under the sun but they do stock the best, most interesting and beautiful tomes around and hire passionate staff to help you find exactly what you need. They offer a huge amount of knowledge and customer service and furthermore, they’ve focused on hosting in-store events and readings, producing a fantastic monthly newsletter and generally working to foster a sense of community around the store. All things Borders, A&R and Co. don’t do.

In a world where any one of millions of books are available at a few mouse clicks away, a bookstore which has just 30,000 books (apparently the inventory at a Borders store) actually doesn’t seem as exciting or appealing as it once did. In fact, customers are often looking for just the opposite: a tightly edited, highly curated range without any of the dreck to get in the way.

As traditional retailers continue to struggle to work out a way to compete with online I suspect we’re going to see ever more of these small-scale, niche ‘curatorial commerce’ stores continuing to spring up to occupy the void that the online experience just cannot fill.

What do you guys reckon? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Sad news yesterday for book and magazine lovers in Australia and New Zealand, as the parent company of Borders, Angus and Robertson and Whitcoulls announced that it was going into voluntary administration.

It’s important to note here that this doesn’t necessarily mean that these stores are shutting down. More than anything it means that they’ve acknowledged that something is seriously wrong with their business and that they need to take some drastic measures to turn it around.

Thanks to everyone who tweeted, e-mailed and called… but contrary to popular belief, we’re not rejoicing. As far as we’re concerned any book store shutting down anywhere is pretty much always a bad thing. We love books and we love bookstores and their presence is absolutely good for the publishing industry as a whole.

Other than the fact that 2,500 jobs might be lost, which is a massive deal in itself, it is bad for the magazine industry. Borders (and to a lesser extent Whitcoulls) make up part of our competitive landscape. Competition is a good thing: it keeps us on our toes and forces us to innovate. But, even more importantly, it stimulates demand. We don’t (and can’t!) have the far-flung geographic presence that Angus & Robertson or Whitcoulls has. If those stores close, it means that lots of folks will no longer have access to all the awesome magazine titles that we love. While many of you will think that this is a great thing for mag nation, as it means that more sales will come our way, this is very much a short-term perspective.

Many of the customers who buy these niche mags will simply stop buying. This is a disaster for the niche publisher, who sells a lot of magazines through us, but who also sells a lot through our competitors. If these customers simply drop out of the market, the publishers lose, which puts pressure on their business model, which in turn impacts us. Not to mention the residents of Tuggerah in New South Wales or Chermside in Queensland, just some of the 26 locations serviced by Borders stores across Australia.

So, you can see that it is not as simple as smugly smiling at the woes of a competitor. Not that we would do that anyway, but life is a little more complicated. This doesn’t mean that we won’t think aggressively about how to woo their customers. Competition is competition and magazines make up only a small part of their overall business.

Yet, even if we have the boxing gloves on, winning on points in this instance is better than a knock out punch.