Manager Shalon Ewington at the Hard To Find Book Store in Onehunga, where customers can't stop coming back for more books. Photo / Doug Sherring
Manager Shalon Ewington at the Hard To Find Book Store in Onehunga, where customers can't stop coming back for more books. Photo / Doug Sherring
Doomsayers claim the closure of Auckland's central city Whitcoulls is the end of the chapter for bookstores, but Paul Little finds the business of selling books is more of a Neverending Story.
No more Whitcoulls on Queen St. It is the end of bookshops as we know them if you listen to the wails on social media after James Pascoe Group, owner of Whitcoulls, Farmers, Pascoes and a clutch of other high-profile retailers, announced it is to rebrand the CBD flagship.
Whitcoulls will close at the end of this month and Farmers will open in the same building sometime later this year.
Symbolically, it seems an event of some magnitude. Whitcoulls and before it Whitcombe and Tombs, has been on Queen St forever. Indeed, one staff member has been with the firm for 57 years - not just before online, but before there was Sellotape, when books left the shop wrapped up in brown paper and string.
The change is evolution not extinction, according to the company's book manager, Joan Mackenzie.
"We certainly don't see it as the end of bookselling," says Mackenzie. "Obviously the Whitcoulls flagship store is morphing into a Farmers store, but that doesn't mean we're abandoning the centre city or walking away from books or that Whitcoulls as we know it is going to change forever."
The social media doomsayers forget that before the Pascoe group took Whitcoulls under its wing it was in such a poor state it risked disappearing not just from Queen St but from the planet. And that Farmers disappeared entirely from the CBD for some years before making a small-scale return. Or that the Whitcoulls building once housed the much-loved John Courts department store.
Change is normal and constant. "We have just closed a couple of tiddlers," says Mackenzie. "Te Awamutu and Upper Hutt. And we are looking at opening new stores as well, with plans for a number of sites including the North West development behind Westgate, and other locations."
Sam Shosanya, CEO of Paper Plus, says the industry is always under pressure and always changing. "It has been challenging in recent times. There have been a couple of closures, but there is a lot of development going on.
"We have a number of queries [from would-be franchisees], so people are still interested in buying stores. What we are exploring is the opportunity to increase the number of stores because a huge amount of the benefit we accrue is a function of volume in purchases."
All's well at the top, then, but book people do seem easily spooked. Not so long ago the entire industry was quaking at the havoc to be wrought by the twin perils of online selling and ebooks. Didn't really happen that way.
Observers can be forgiven for having thought something was up when international publishers started to scale down their local operations a few years ago. However, this had less to do with declining sales than with corporate ruthlessness in general.
The flagship Queen street Whitcoulls, soon to be replaced by Farmers. Photo / Doug Sherring
"It was easy to imagine that multinationals like HarperCollins and Hachette had shrunk down their operations because of declining sales," says Sam Elworthy, president of the Publishers Association of New Zealand and boss of the thriving Auckland University Press (AUP).
"But the timing doesn't work on that. Those publishers have their own strategies and the world environment shaped what they were doing more than the New Zealand environment."
In other words, they saw an opportunity to save money by downsizing New Zealand operations and took it.
Shosanya agrees the real problems were overlooked. "For a long time the coincidence of the growth of ebooks and the behaviour of the economy in some instances, with the likes of exchange rates, was creating a perfect storm. It led people to believe the impact of digital was directly causal of issues we saw in the retailing of books and consequential closure of bookshops. I don't want to underplay digital's impact but there were other forces at play and now some of those forces aren't quite so prevalent."
In fact, book sales fell from about $140 million in 2009 to a low of $115m in 2013, according to Nielsen Bookscan figures. They levelled out and are up 5 per cent this year compared to the same period last year.
As for the digital impact, in the 12 months to March, online retail sales were $3 billion or 6.4 per cent of all business, but although total retail spending went up by 6 per cent, online went up by 9 per cent - more than half as much again as retail in general.
And in the category of recreation, books and entertainment media, online sales were 14 per cent of the total.
No data is collected for ebooks but publishers will claim anywhere between 5 and 20 per cent of sales are in ebook form, says Nielsen sales and marketing manager Nevena Nikolic. Elworthy says ebooks make up about 10 per cent of his sales.
Ebooks do well when they do something bookshops can't. In AUP's case, a lot of ebook sales are backlist titles even the most supportive bookshop does not have room to keep in stock.
Whitcoulls doesn't sell ebooks or doohickeys for reading them on. Not core business, says Mackenzie. "We did an evaluation and decided we wouldn't play with digital. We don't sell ebooks and don't sell devices because they are a technical proposition.
"We don't do technical and we don't do after-sales service. We would rather persuade people to pick up a book."
It's this direct experience that has been key to the survival of bookshops of every kind in the face of online retailers. As your eye runs across a web page it doesn't chance upon a title it might not otherwise have seen, pick it up and discover something new and exciting. Yes, you only have to walk to the letterbox instead of driving to the shop. But you can drive to the shop now instead of waiting days to make that walk. And all too often, when you get to the letterbox you discover a card saying your item was far too bulky and would you please drive to the nearest postal centre to collect it at the time most inconvenient to you.
Mackenzie says the online bookselling challenge is being met. Only a bricks and mortar store, for instance, will have humans inside it who can recommend books to shoppers.
"A huge number of books are still being published, which tells us about the health of the sector," says Mackenzie. "It can be overwhelming for a reader to be confronted by so much choice.
"We think our job is to help people understand what will work for them. We have devices like our 'Top 100' and 'Joan's Picks' that work well. Over time they've built up a degree of credibility and we've a lot of repeat business."
Shosanya is confident the 125 or so Paper Plus and Take Note stores under his aegis will continue not just to survive but to prosper.
They will do it by providing what their customers want, which means, in his estimation, New Zealand non-fiction, especially food-related and, being a franchise, "the advantage we have is that we are working with people who are spending their own money. I never have to question their motivation."
Mackenzie shares that customer-oriented approach, coloured by awareness of important new factors: "I've noticed everybody is all about the next big thing and older stuff no longer holds the level of interest. I blame that on social media, which is all about the here and now. So we're constantly refining the range and trying to make sure we're relevant and offering what people want."
Customers browsing in Whitcoulls Queen street. Photo / Doug Sherring
Which is why Whitcoulls did rather well with a book of Kim Kardashian selfies that the publisher was having trouble selling into the local market.
One shop that reports no decline in sales over the years when they were falling generally is Unity Books, just a few metres from Whitcoulls. Unity owner Jo McColl takes no pleasure in the departure of the bigger player. For her it creates 50 shades of headache.
With what will soon be the only bookshop near Queen St - the building housing Whitcoulls Downtown branch will be demolished next year - she has been under pressure to be all bookshops to all buyers.
"Please tell us you're not going to turn into Whitcoulls," she reports her regulars saying. They fear the Mark Z Danielewski and Philip K Dick titles will be cleared from shelves to make way for the hundreds of copies of the new EL James that the publishers previously had sold through Whitcoulls. And that could have happened.
"Penguin Random House contacted us about the new 50 Shades of Grey book. Normally we'd stock three but they only want to sell bulk cartons. And now we're thinking: are we going to have a market for 100 or are we not interested for 100? Do we change things? We decided to stick to three, which now they won't give us."
McColl won't even try to fill the gap left by Whitcoulls. "We'd lose out. Our loyal customers, of which there are many, would hate it. We wouldn't enjoy selling a Grey."
For now, she is more worried about how many Christmas cards she should order and where she's going to put them.
For the people on the other side of the counter, things have never been so good in terms of accessibility and variety of titles on offer. As well as the chains with their mountains of mass-market titles, quality independents such as Unity cater for general interests, complemented by an array of specialist stores covering everything from children's and women's books to cookbooks and technical books.
Auckland also has excellent second-hand shops such as Jasons and Brazier's, for those hard-to-find and out-of-print titles.
For a dedicated book buyer, such as Paul Dykzeul, CEO of magazine publisher Bauer Media, who buys around 200 books a year, these are halcyon days.
"What triggers me often is reading a book about a subject and there'll be a reference to someone else and from there I go to buy it," says Dykzeul. "It's unusual for me to walk down High St without walking into Unity. Jo knows me and she will say, 'I saw this the other day and thought it was you' and she'll have put it aside for me."
Publishing guru and former head of Penguin Books Graham Beattie emphasises that. "There are two main types of bookshop and ideally having both is the best solution - the indie type bookstores plus the chains like Whitcoulls and Paper Plus who do a good job, especially in the malls, where they look after folk who may feel intimidated by the smaller specialist shops."
The people spoken to for this story all had two things in common: a cautious confidence that the future is looking better for bookshops than it did a few years ago and a personal passion for books.
As Paper Plus' Shosanya sums up: "I always say to kids and people who ask that the two things that have had the biggest influence on me are my parents and the books I've read."
Shosanya says nothing can replace the sense of community that is to be found in a bookshop where you can get advice, browse and enjoy the tactile sensation of a book.
He quotes a futurologist's prediction that online retailers will increasingly have to open their own bricks and mortar versions. "Increasingly as more products that have zero emotional investment are available online," he says, "I think bookshops could become even more important."
Hard to find and happy
Hard to Find bookstore founder Warwick Jordan never believed digital technology would lead to the demise of print books.
Based on what has been happening at Jordan's popular second-hand bookstore in Dunedin and its Auckland branch in Onehunga, he's right.
E-book readers such as Kindles have become a supplement to people's book-buying habits, not a replacement, Jordan says.
"The comment I keep getting is that someone will read something on their Kindle but then they want to own the physical book. It has started to become more noticeable in the last year or two."
Jordan is not surprised. "People have always asked me if I was feeling threatened by it all? Not at all. CDs and DVDs, and LPs, have been around as a technology a matter of a few years.
"Books have been part of human society for thousands of years. They don't get knocked over so easily."
In Hard to Find's Onehunga branch, manager Shalon Ewington has witnessed the same pattern of e-book reader users returning to hard copies.
"They missed their books."
Some found Kindle did not meet their needs, such as the person studying a William Shakespeare play who decided it was too hard to follow the Bard's work using a Kindle, Ewington says.
"They couldn't flick back through the pages so easily. It was too hard."
And there's the fact that e-book readers just don't look as good as a shelf full of books.
Jordan doesn't own a Kindle - he's not against owning one, but reckons he wouldn't use it much. And it wouldn't replace his bookshelves.
"It just doesn't look the same as a shelf of books. There's a book by Anthony Powell [called] Books Do Furnish a Room. I think that sums it up perfectly."
