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| Mark Rubbo | |
At the end of June, Mark Rubbo is retiring as managing director of Readings, which has eight bookstores in and around Melbourne, Australia, Books + Publishing reported. He will become chair of the Readings board. Joe Rubbo, his son and operations manager, will run the business.
"We have been working on the transition for a few years, but Covid interrupted that," Mark Rubbo told Books + Publishing. "Joe is as passionate about Reading as I, and I feel very confident that it will be in good hands."
Mark Rubbo has owned Readings since 1976, expanding it over the years and making it one of the preeminent bookstores in Australia. Readings was the inaugural winner of the London Book Fair's international Bookstore of the Year Award in 2016 and has received multiple bookshop of the year awards in Australia. Rubbo is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association (now BookPeople) and received a Medal of the Order of Australia. He is a gifted bookseller and has always been a warm, welcoming, thoughtful host to various American visitors. We're glad he's staying involved in Readings.
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The London Book Fair is "investigating if there is a possibility to move the LBF dates" for 2024 due to a near-clash in scheduling of the Bologna Children's Book Fair, LBF director Gareth Rapley told the Bookseller. BCBF recently announced that next year's fair would take place April 8-11, putting it close to LBF's scheduled April 16-18 dates.
"We released our dates for the London Book Fair 2024 in October 2022. We were only made aware of Bologna Children's Book Fair 2024 dates in March 2023, and the dates were decided without prior consultation with LBF," Rapley said, adding that any rescheduling is dependent on the availability of the venue, Olympia London. "In any event, we will strive to ensure minimal disruption to our visitors. It is a shame that the issue around dates seems to be splitting the industry, forcing people to choose one fair over the other."
BCBF director Eleana Pasoli observed: "BolognaFiere's calendar is particularly busy in March due to the presence of two very large B2B trade fairs, which occupy the entire fairground plus some additional temporary halls built specifically to accommodate them. Logistically, therefore, the set-up and dismantling times are long and impose a shift of the other trade shows to April."
She added the fair has also heard "favorable opinions from long haul overseas exhibitors, for whom the proximity of the fairs is a positive aspect.... Of course, we are in constant dialogue with all the organizers of the national collective stands and also with individual exhibitors to ameliorate their experience as far as possible. When Bologna and LBF were as close in dateline once before, we worked closely together on logistics for mutual exhibitors and look forward to doing so again."
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In Canada, browsing for books is making a comeback, according to data from the Canadian Book Consumer survey, in anticipation of the release of the Canadian Book Consumer Study 2022 next month. BookNet Canada reported that the wane of the Covid-19 pandemic "also marked the rise of something else--in-person browsing for books. And this return to book browsing makes a difference in book buying and borrowing.
In 2022, 37% of Canadian book buyers felt that Covid-19 was affecting their book buying, down from 47% in 2021 and 45% in 2020. Out of all the book buyers surveyed last year, 64% visited a bookstore in person, up from 55% in 2021 and 54% in 2020. Year over year, most book buyers visited a bookstore in-person at least one to four times--a percentage that increased 38% from 2020 to 2022.
Frequent visits were not as popular, with only 5% of respondents visiting a bookstore in person five to nine times in 2021 and 2022 compared to 6% in 2020. In addition, those visiting a bookstore 10 to 14 times showed a downward trend from 4% (2020) to 3% (2021) to 1% (2022).
The percentage of online bookstore visits by Canadian book buyers has remained relatively consistent: 73% in 2020, 76% in 2021, and 73% in 2022 visited a bookstore online at least once.
The top four reasons book buyers visited in-store in 2022 were related to browsing:
- Browse books to pass time: 29% (up 30% from 2021 to 2022)
- Browse for book deals and sales: 26% (up 28% from 2021 to 2022)
- Browse displays and shelves for books to buy: 26% (up 20% from 2021 to 2022)
- Browse new releases: 23% (up 10% from 2021 to 2022)
Out of all the book purchases tracked through the Canadian Book Consumer survey in 2022, 20% of Canadian book buyers became aware of the book they bought by searching or browsing either online or in-person. Of those book buyers, 33% discovered the book they bought by browsing in-store--up 38% from 2020.
Of all book purchases in 2022, 18% were impulse buys, up 13% from 2021. The number of purchases where the book buyer was planning to buy a book at that specific time, but not a particular book, also increased to 18%, up 6% from the year before. The number of purchases where buyers had planned to buy a particular book, but not necessarily at a specific time, remained the same for both years (25%). And the number of book buyers who had planned to buy a particular book at a specific time decreased to 36%, down 8%. --Robert Gray