ROBYN BARGH LOOKS AT THE RECENT PAST & THE FUTURE OF THE NZ BOOK TRADE

In the latest issue of Booksellers News there is a thoughtful piece by Robyn Bargh, co-founder and MD of Huia Publishers which is worth reading and considering.

Huia Publishers is an independent Wellington-based publishing house that is deeply committed "to publishing Maori perspectives within a Pacific and indigenous framework" and core to this is their "commitment to providing a platform for Maori perspectives".

After a cautious start 15 years ago they now play a significant role in the life of New Zealand publishing with much of their work being truly ground-breaking. For example during 2006 they published the first monolingual Maori dictionary, which to their delight is shortlisted for the Montana NZ Book Awards.

Here then is Robyn's editorial which appeared originally in the June 2007 issue of Booksellers News:

The Winds of Change

ONCE UPON a time in a land far, far away there lived a little old man and a little old woman. Every day they worked happily in their bookshop, reading books, dusting shelves, chatting to their customers and selling books, and every couple of months chewing the fat with their friendly sales reps bringing new books from the publishers. One day the winds started to blow ... the winds of change began to blow across the world.
It is now May 2007, not even ten years after the millennium. Yet time and change is rushing past like a hurricane. W a a a i t ...!
The book industry is hurtling along as well. We are living in a world of globalisation where big companies buy and sell little companies, medium sized companies and even other big companies. In the book industry we are watching a few big companies dominating the world, chasing the elusive “best-seller” best-selling book, best-selling author and bestselling company. In the last year we have seen lots of change: Paper Plus, Borders and now Reed -in the year of its 100th anniversary, New Zealand’s oldest publisher has just been sold by one multinational to another.
We all talk about digitisation but to keep up you need to spend hours each day reading and going to seminars about all the changes to digital:

Publishers now expect writers to submit electronic versions of their manuscript as well as the thick wad of paper > In production we have not only replaced hot press, bromides, film and galley proofs with PDFs to plate, but we can now use digital production to produce multiple formats, different size formats, CD Rom, online and e-books . Both publishers and booksellers have electronic business functions

ROBYN BARGH on the accelerating world of bookselling and publishing
that integrate everything from rights
management to payroll
> Distribution does still involve getting actual books to book stores but it also includes bookshops with point of sale software, electronic ordering, invoicing and returns as well as websites that direct customers to a book and to a bookstore
> Little publisher websites promote authors and books as well as, dare I say it, sell books
... the new digital warehouse will provide the same “single channel solution” for the supply and fulfillment of digital material including the sale of e-Books ...

> Google and big publishers have websites which, to help sell books, show substantial chunks of text from the book, creating nightmarish intellectual property issues for publishers and writers
> Libraries which these days have been transformed from those wonderful, dreamy repositories of books to digital wonderlands. “Can I help you”, increasingly means, “look it up on the nearest computer”.
We are all hoping to get Bookscan
which will give publishers and booksellers
information on buying and selling patterns.
And now we have Gardners’ digital warehouse,
a comprehensive range of e-commerce services
for booksellers and publishers including, “the capability for publishers to link their existing digital files, e-Books, audio downloads and extended bibliographic content ... to Gardners range of internet and high street retailers.” According to their publicity, the new digital warehouse will provide the same “single channel solution” for the supply and fulfillment of digital material, including the sale of e-Books, as the physical warehouse.

Then there are the readers, the oldies who just like a good book in front of a fire, the baby-boomers with a constant search for justice and mind expansion, and the much talked about Generations X and Y with their short concentration spans, fast pick up of technology, their obsession with text messages and computer games and their search for the perfect partner. They google their world.
So what does this all mean for the little old man and the little old woman in their bookshop in the land far, far away? They have broadband wireless and an IPod shuffle. They order books online, they can track the books they have and they can let their customers know what books they have.
But what do readers like? They may search on the web, they may even buy the odd book on Amazon.com but they are more likely to ring, email or text their nearest bookseller to ask if they have a book, where they can get it, or how it can be ordered. And most of all there is nothing in the whole wide world that customers enjoy more than going to their favourite bookshop to look at actual books, peruse the shelves, touch the books, read the back covers, talk about books and maybe buy one or two or three ....

Robyn Bargh Managing Director, Huia (NZ) Ltd Email Robyn@huia.co.nz Booksellers News June 07

Picture taken at launch of Sexuality & Beyond Biculturalism shows left to right, Georgina Beyer, Louisa Wall & Robyn Bargh.