What's the future? … Don Grover says consumers still ''love the smell and the touch and the feel of a book'', although the chain is diversifying into other areas. Photo: Dallas Kilponen DAK

A tumultuous year for booksellers ended on a strong note for survivors, but the future is still something of a mystery.
Don Grover, the boss of Dymocks, doesn't like fiction. Never has, never will. The retailer, not an avid reader in general, enjoys the occasional biography and history book, ''apart from anything that's work-related, which probably makes up most of my reading''.
Yet reading the bookchain's closely guarded accounts these days should give him as much pleasure as the yarns of his favourite author, Peter FitzSimons. Bucking a season of dire Christmas sales across the retail sector, Dymocks's revenues were ''well up'' on the previous year.
Some six months after the last Borders bookstore closed its doors in Australia, the nation's now-biggest book retailer has been able to capitalise on the private equity-owned chain's collapse, winning new customers even as the local $1.3 billion book industry continued to decline amid stepped up competition from the internet and a lack of new blockbuster book series.