At 8.41am on Monday, online bookseller Booktopia’s board of directors released an update to the stock exchange that gave away just how acutely the business was struggling. Its new boss, barely one year into the job, had suddenly and inexplicably resigned; 50 jobs were on the line (adding to theannounced by Australia’s biggest online bookstore are the latest of many as it battles three straight years of unprofitability, a rock-bottom share price that has plummeted 98 per cent to 4.
“If you can’t take and set yourself up, something’s not quite right,” said Egan. “Booktopia is a business that hasn’t been run properly.”Booktopia – and its much larger US competitor Amazon, arguably the world’s most successful online bookstore – have been a threat to bricks-and-mortar bookshops.But they also forced the traditional bookshops to adapt and sharpen their point of difference as a physical space.
To encourage foot traffic and create a welcoming space, interior design and the in-store experience have been carefully considered. Readings’ flagship Carlton store was redesigned by Nest Architects, while its Hawthorn and Emporium stores were crafted by Kerstin Thompson Architects. Like every other business, bookshop operators are watching their rent, electricity and insurance bills go up, while the price of books has stayed fairly stable over the years. At the same time, pricing competition is coming from not only online players, but a surprising retail segment: discount department stores.
“People tell us, ‘here I am with my six-year-old, and when I was a six-year-old, my mum and dad bought all my books from you … you turned my child into a reader’,” he said.“It’s not rocket science to know that that’s something you should get right, and that’s something no online retailer can offer.”The frontier of customer service is not one that Booktopia has been winning lately amid a rising tide of customers complaining about significant delays.
“They’ve lost a lot of good people. They lost people who’d been there 10 or more years,” they said, speaking under condition of anonymity. “They took redundancies … their salaries were too high for the size of the business.”