Sally Sara: Book sales soared during the height of the pandemic when many Australians were in desperate search of a good read. But a major player in the industry has come crashing back to earth. The country’s biggest locally owned online bookseller, Booktopia, has gone into voluntary administration. And some local booksellers worry that it means more Australians are buying books via the big international firms such as Amazon. Angus Randall reports.
Angus Randall: Booktopia has been one of the biggest players in the Australian book market for nearly 20 years. It’s now in voluntary administration. Robbie Egan is the chief executive at BookPeople, the Australian booksellers association.
Robbie Egan: That is pretty dramatic withdrawal out of the supply chain in what is an instant. So, particularly for smaller Australian publishers and Australian writers who sell quite a big proportion of their books through that one channel, this is extremely worrying.
Angus Randall: You can still buy books from Booktopia as of this morning, but there’s significant uncertainty over its future. The online seller suffered a $16 million loss in the six months to December. It recently spent $12 million on a high-tech warehouse in sydney‘s inner…
