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Another dying gasp

Who remembers a world before the internet?

Way back then, I'd trot down to the University Book shop in Auckland on a regular basis and scan the shelves for some weighty tome that might be worth the hefty price that was charged for such things.

It was not uncommon to fork out $80 or more (and we're talking 1980s dollars) for a decent paperback edition of some worthy title and my house was lined with bookcases, all groaning under the weight of that dead tree flesh with its inky stains.

Between the two of us, the wife and I probably spent $4K on books every year and in the end we pretty much ran out of space in which to store them.

But now it's 2013 and things have changed.

These days, you can fit an entire library on a 32GB microSD card so storage is no longer the problem it used to be.

All that money I can save on bookcases is able to be spent on the content of the books themselves -- that's great!

But more importantly, I can buy whatever books I want (in e-form or pulp) from the comfort and convenience of my keyboard.

Gone are the days when the local book shop would charge you an arm and a leg to buy a few hundred sheets of inky paper -- now you can import any volume you like for a fraction of those old rip-off prices.

And yes, they were really rip-off prices!

The biggest problem with buying books in NZ is that they invariably came through a distributor in Australia -- which added extra margins and extra freight charges to almost everything on our shelves.

Even books that were printed and published in the USA had to take a big detour through Oz before they made it to Godzone and that was reflected in a price that was almost always 40%-60% more than it should have been. But this was the pre-Net era and there were no real options -- so we just gritted our teeth and paid the money.

Now, thanks to Amazon.com and a raft of other online booksellers, the tyranny of the tightly locked up and protected distribution chain has been smashed and people are free to buy what they want from wherever they want.

Of course this leaves the poor old bookshops in the lurch and in France, the government has stepped in to pledge 9m Euros to help compensate those shops for loss of trade due to the likes of Amazon.

This in turn has lead UK bookshops to demand similar subsidies from their government and no doubt the Kiwi bookshops will soon be lobbying our government for similar hand-outs.

Well sorry guys -- but just as the age of carbon-paper and blacksmiths in every high street has been and gone, I suspect that the days when bricks and mortar bookshops were a highly profitable way to make money are also on the wane.

We've seen the recording and movie industries all fighting to protect outdated business models and now booksellers are doing the same.

Much as I enjoy a quiet afternoon perusing the shelves of a "real" bookshop, I'm not going to pay through the nose (in the form of those extortionate shelf-prices) for the privilege. I'll gladly forgo my browsing experience in return for paying just 30% of the NZ cover price by purchasing online, thank you very much.

What do readers think?

Have Kiwis been ripped off by highly protected and very lucrative distribution channels for long enough? Where do you buy most of your reading material these days and in what form?

Please share any good links to worthwhile sites where we can pick up good books (or ebooks) for a reasonable price.

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