By Jamie Gray, New Zealand Herald, 5:30 AM Saturday May 28, 201
New owners of bookstore chains must keep pace with e-market, experts say. Photo / Greg Bowker
They say the threat of books that can be bought cheaply off websites such as Amazon.com, and from titles that can be downloaded on to e-book devices such as Amazon's Kindle, and Apple's iPad, will not have been lost on the Normans, who on Thursday bought the chains for an undisclosed sum from the administrators of the failed Australasia retailer, REDgroup.
The chains were sold to Project Mark, a company in the Normans' James Pascoe Group, which operates Pascoes, Farmers, Stewart Dawsons, Goldmark, Stevens, Prouds and Angus & Coote and employs more than 9000 staff in New Zealand and Australia.
Despite the likely hurdles, analysts are upbeat about the prospects of the Normans replicating the success they had with the Farmers retail chain, which they bought from Australia's Foodland Associated for $123 million in 2003.
Full story at New Zealand Herald.
1 comment:
The obvious sensible thing for all bookstores in NZ to do, if they want to survive, is substantially increase their range of NZ book titles. People locally can't buy these online from The Book Depository, Amazon etc, (or if they can it will be at much higher prices); secondly why would visitors to this country go into bookstores to buy books they can buy much more cheaply at home?
It seems so obvious to us, but not to bookstore owners???
Post a Comment