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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/63758/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">
GUEST OBSERVER
This National Bookshop Day, Australia’s one-time Minister for Small Business, Nick Sherry, will be remembered for his words, not his deeds.
A reader, bookbuyer and enthusiastic patron of terrestrial bookshops, in June 2011 Sherry told a conference on online business that,
"In five years, other than a few speciality bookshops in capital cities, you will not see a bookstore. They will cease to exist."
Booksellers were livid, and I don’t just mean standing behind their counters muttering impolite thoughts about the minister down into their cardigans. They got pretty shouty. And determined to prove him wrong.
Australia’s inaugural National Bookshop Day was held two months later. The sixth, on August 13, will be the first to fall beyond the minister’s five-year time period. And bricks-and-mortar booksellers have outlasted VCR manufacturers, Kodachrome and Nokia’s dominance of the phone industry to still be alive and kicking.
As it turned out, the minister was wrong – he extrapolated too far – but there were reasons at the time to have reservations about the industry’s prospects. The REDGroup – parent company of Borders and Angus &amp; Robertson – had just gone into receivership and there were concerns that much of its 20% share of the Australian book trade might simply be lost, with those dollars drifting away from books, or at least from Australian retailers.
Amazon had been on the rise since the 90s, and almost no one could price like it. It paid no high-street rents, it paid no counter staff, it had scale and much of the time it wasn’t even focused on profit, cutting prices even leaner to build its customer database and achieve market dominance.
When Sherry spoke, the GFC was still a recent memory, and books had started to look like discretionary purchases. Around the same time, the promise of e-reading was finally realised with the arrival of devices that people were actually happy to use, such as the Kindle and the iPad. US ebook sales had <a href="">risen 1,260%</a> between 2008 and 2010. The line on that graph goes to a crazy place pretty quickly, if you let it.
Factor in the time-sucking vortex of the internet – Facebook, YouTube, news, gossip, downloadable games, streaming video services, op-ed pieces like, um, this one – and its potential impact on book reading, and the environment looks extra tough. Charles Darwin, survival-of-the-fittest tough.
So in 2011, it was possible, if you stared wide-eyed and fearfully at nothing but recent statistics and an upended entertainment landscape, to envisage a contracted book industry comprising only ebooks and a single enormous warehouse that had paper books zipping along conveyor belts and packaged and mailed by robots in response to a customer’s click on the other side of the world.
In the short term, Sherry seemed dangerously close to the mark. In the year he made his prediction, Australian book sales ended up crashing 18 percent by value. That is, a billion-dollar industry saw sales slump by almost a fifth in a single year. The following year, the industry relied on Fifty Shades of Grey to mask another disastrous fall. Remove that trilogy from the stats and sales dropped a further 12.5 percent in 2012.
But it’s now 2016 and the scheduled apocalypse didn’t arrive. So, what happened?
Ebooks are here to stay, but paper books aren’t going away and, despite Amazon, neither is the astute neighbourhood bookseller – who realises that ebooks are not an enemy vanquished and that the landscape is not what it once was, but that the local bookshop has a place in it anyway. Recently, bookshop numbers have been rising rather than falling. <a href="">According to Joel Becker</a>, CEO of the Australian Booksellers Association, “we’ve seen an increase over the past couple of years of about 5 percent.”
The ebook market will continue to evolve, and what ebooks are will continue to evolve too, but, in the absence of major drivers of new growth, sales are unlikely to grow at the rate they managed at the time of the Sherry prediction. The audiobook market will probably continue to expand.
While all panicked eyes were on ebooks, audio sales – now mostly digital downloads – were happily off to one side growing at double-digit speed year after year.
Meanwhile, back in the world of paper books, Amazon will not go away.
In fact, Amazon is opening bookshops of its own. Because maybe even it knows that “people who bought this also bought that” isn’t the same as browsing the shelves of a neighbourhood bookshop. It rates as an experience, and flicking through stamp-sized book cover images online really doesn’t.
Browsing in a bookshop feels like time well spent, while searching for a book online feel like squandered time – only the purchase counts.
A local bookshop is part of a community, working with schools and families and all nearby readers to link them with books they might come to love, connecting with its customers and bringing a human kind of expertise whenever it’s asked for. It is a hub for bookclubs and author events and the chance encounters that lead to the discovery of an unfamiliar writer who becomes a lifelong favourite. It remains far better than an algorithm when suggesting what book your eight-year-old niece or granddaughter might like for her birthday.
And, happy as I am to read ebooks or listen to audiobooks, the local bookshop’s product, paper books, rates as entertainment. The paper book is a value proposition. Twenty or thirty dollars buys you hours of deep, screen-free, distraction-free reading. Nothing pings, nothing beeps and your paper book doesn’t let you know about some random person’s Facebook update or a newly arrived spam email. In a world of multi-tasking and deliriously excessive inputs, reading a paper book is mono-tasking at its finest.
Paper books and the people in our neighbourhoods who sell them to us have not faded into the past and will not be going away any time soon. I’m sure Nick Sherry would be happy to be wrong about that, and will be as glad as any of us that we still have bookshops to celebrate at National Bookshop Day in 2016.
Nick Earls<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nick-earls-291096" rel="author"></a> is PhD Candidate in Creative Writing, The University of Queensland and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nick-earls-291096" target="_blank">here</a>.
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All hail the bookshop: survivor against the odds

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A South Melbourne commercial property leased to burger giant Grill’d has fetched $3.36 million at auction.
The Clarendon St premises sold on a yield of 3.4 percent after bidding from local and international investors.
Grill’d recently signed a new seven-year lease for the shop, with an option of a further seven years.
It was sold by Fitzroys agent Andrew Hewett.
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Grill'd South Melbourne premises sell

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A shop and apartment with independent leases in Sydney’s inner west suburb of Dulwich Hill will go under the hammer through Raine &amp; Horne on September 20.
The shop on the ground floor shop is leased to a dental practice, with its lease expiring late-2017.
The first floor comprises a two-bedroom unit and has a separate lease.
The total site area is nearly 202 sqm.
Zoned B2 Local Centre, the property is suited for a range of future uses or developments.
The site is surrounded by cafes, restaurants, banks and shops and close to transport. 
The selling agent is Luke Smith of Raine &amp; Horne Commercial.
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Shop and unit in Sydney's Dulwich Hill beckons investors at Raine & Horne auction

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Melbourne fashion designer and retailer Anna Hoffman has agreed terms on the lease of a new store in Armadale in Melbourne’s leafy inner eastern suburbs.
The deal for 1020 High Street was brokered by Teska Carson’s Tom Maule.  
The 80 square metre premises was let at $56,000 per annum net, a rate of $700 a square metre, on a three-year term with options. 
“Anna Hoffman required a spacious retail area in a location which offered first rate exposure in an appropriate location for fashion,” Maule said.
“This part of High Street is well stocked with boutique fashion and dining establishments attracting a high level of clientele from all over Melbourne.’’ 
The lessor is a Melbourne-based private investor. 
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Fashion house Anna Hoffman moves into Melbourne’s chic street

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A shop front and a two-level apartment in Sydney’s Randwick recently sold for $1.7 million.
The property at <a href="https://www.realcommercial.com.au/property-retail-nsw-randwick-502092350" target="_blank">5 Canberra Street, Randwick</a> is close to Coogee Beach and the University of NSW. 
Built on a land area of 205 sqm, the property comprises a retail shop front and an apartment, which the description says is in “absolute original condition”.
The apartment has a separate entry and spans two-levels with living and kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms plus a study upstairs.
The property offers scope for further improvements and redesign subject to council approval.
The deal was through Hugh Harrison and Theo Karangis of N G Farah Real Estate.
<img src="/images/2016/10/03/Randwick1.jpg" alt="">
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Shop and unit in Sydney's Randwick fetches $1.7 million

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A leased shopfront in Melbourne’s far east has been snapped up by a local investor for $750,000, highlighting the affordability of the city’s far eastern suburbs.
The <a href="https://www.realcommercial.com.au/property-retail-vic-croydon-502300130" target="_blank">71 Wicklow Avenue</a> property in Croydon is leased to Linear Hair Salon for one year, with another one-year option to renew.
The retail asset was sold in an off-market deal through Colliers International’s Jackie Hanna.
She said the $8,333 rate per sqm for the 90 sqm corner shop was a “great result” for a freehold under a short-term lease.
“We received significant local enquiry for this asset,” she said.
“Investors saw the upside potential given the property’s proximity to the local shops and train station.”
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Shopfront in Melbourne’s far eastern Croydon suburb sells for $750,000

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Women's clothing and accessories retailer Who Fish has taken a lease at Hawksburn Village in Melbourne’s inner east.
Who Fish have signed a five year lease with a five year option for The Shop 3, 537 Malvern Road. 
Teska Carson’s Luke Bisset and Fergus Evans brokered the deal. 
Mr Bisset said the tenant had sought a premises in a location which offered excellent exposure to a highly fashion conscious market and which was easily accessible for current clients including parking and public transport.
"After eight years Who Fish is relocating from just down the road to be in the heart of Hawksburn Village, one of the most popular retail strips in the inner-east and which offers strong growth potential,’’ he said.
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Retailer Who Fish takes Hawksburn lease

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A refurbished ground floor retail space in Sydney’s Potts Point is up for auction.
Lot 1 at 39 Elizabeth Bay Road is fully refurbished has potential for capital growth.
It could be an entry level investment for an investor or for an owner occupier.
The strata shop is surrounded by cafes, restaurants, fashion boutiques and residential dwellings.
The 71 sqm shop has street frontage and suits  a number of uses including retail, showroom, office, or creative studio.
The auction is on December 7 at Cooley Auction Centre in Sydney CBD, 1 Margaret Street (Dexus Place).
The listing agent is David Canelas Krulis Commercial. 
 
 
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