Kobo has reported over 30% in overall traffic to its online bookstore due to the collapse of Borders, Angus & Robertson and the Redgroup. Australia has been an important market to Kobo since the launch of their e-Reader last year, but their future on the other side of the pond remain uncertain due to their entire distribution chain wallowing in bankruptcy.
The head of Kobo in Australia Malcolm Neil, whom is also the CEO of the Australian Book Sellers Association recently told the Sydney Morning Herald that “We actually saw a huge sales spike in the couple weeks afterwords. The e-readers’ saw a 30 per cent increase in traffic to its site, reflecting the general push away from paperback. The mere fact that there is all this speculation whether e-books had pushed REDgroup into administration drove a lot of people to look at e-books.”
The demise of Borders, RedGroup and Angus and Robertson had many extenuating factors. Part of the reason of the failure was due to the Kindle and other competing e-readers that vie for the lucrative Australian Market. David Felon of Redgroup lamented earlier on in the year that Amazon was taking a huge chunk of the Australian ebook market away. Redgroup currently owns 260 bookstores in Australia and New Zealand.
If one thing is clear with the demise of Brick and Motor stores across the pond people are going to be driven towards e-books which are more accessible.
via Sydney Morning Herald
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
