The joy of reading, the art of bookselling, and the need to take risks: A conversation with Book People CEO Robbie Egan
Robbie Egan, current CEO of Book People, formerly the Australian Booksellers Association, has been a major voice in support of books and reading in Australia since taking on this role in 2018.
At the Small Press Network’s networking event on 22 May, I asked about his views on the industry and about his own pathway into a life with books.
‘My gateway to who I was’, he let us know, was his ‘strange upbringing’.
It turns out that Robbie did not grow up in a house filled with books but rather read whatever was lying about, including Peter Benchley’s Jaws – which left him terrified of going in the water. This was a problem, as he was living on a remote island off Papua New Guinea at the time, where his father taught in a Marist mission.
Robbie and his sister, as the only white kids on the island, were unusually conscious of the regrettable frailty of their kind, which, as their peers pointed out, had been so obvious during the Second World War. Relics of the war were everywhere.
He came to Australia as a long-haired eight-year-old, unable to use a knife and fork, and had to clarify for enquiring classmates that he was a boy.
An extended period of now somewhat dimly remembered activity followed, before Robbie decided, at the age of twenty-six, that he’d better get a serious job. A child was on the way.
He wanted to work in a bookshop and was grateful for the opportunity to do so, first afforded him by the managers of the Dymocks bookstore in Melbourne’s CBD, a flagship store in the chain that can be traced back to William Dymock, , in the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps Australia’s first home-grown successful book retailer.
At the store, Robbie occupied a certain niche: ‘I was the literary wanker.’ Having ‘really got into the postmodernists, mostly men, to be honest’, he was able to advise his colleagues that they probably should order more than three copies of the new Don DeLillo, as this book was actually going to sell. Dymocks followed his advice and were glad to have done so.
In turn, Robbie says with a powerful simplicity: ‘They taught me about retail. They sold a lot of books. I loved it.’ (Though also, erstwhile managers at Dymocks, if you’re reading: ‘I didn’t love the uniform.’)
As a bookseller, Robbie encourages kids and others to find the books that appeal to them and to not worry about anyone else’s notion of what they should be reading: ‘I’ve always been really anti-snobbery. I don’t like it when a parent or grandparent says, “You don’t need that.” We have to reject the canon and let people find what is interesting to them. We’re losing the fun and the joy of reading. It shouldn’t be a special thing.’
Robbie became CEO of the Booksellers Association somewhat by accident, being strongly encouraged to apply for the role by colleagues at Readings bookstore.
He doesn’t like to single out particular bookstores as exemplars but does note that Readings, where he worked for many years, ‘is as good as the best bookshops in the world’. ‘Most people don’t realise’, he notes, ‘how many different tasks booksellers do.’
‘Good bookselling’ is, in part, based on having a good product mix, with new releases and frontlist of about 50 per cent each. Many publishers, in Robbie’s view, don’t care enough about their backlist and focus unduly on their upcoming releases.
The trade paperback format, by the way, ‘should be banned’, he said, with tongue only partly in cheek. ‘They’re clunky. They get damaged.’ From a bookseller’s perspective it’s an awkward size, particularly as it moves to backlist. He likes hardbacks and prefers B format to C.
With total bookshop numbers static, at best, over the past five years or so, are we reaching new markets, new readers, including migrants, in the outer suburbs of Australia’s ever-spooling cities?
‘I don’t think so,’ Robbie says. ‘We’re reaching mostly white middle-class people. It’s a conversation that’s been had over and over.’ He notes that bookshops aren’t opening in those outer suburbs as often as we might like, while pointing out that there is a drive to succeed in many migrant families, which often goes along with respect for and encouragement of reading.
I asked Robbie if he was worried about the impact of AI on our industry. Industry stalwart Michael Webster had said to me, shortly before he died in January, that though he’d always been positive about the future of books, the advent of AI did worry him.
‘I’m worried’, says Robbie, ‘because it’s been the biggest theft of output in history … An absolute disgrace.’ And it’s ‘pretty hard to beat companies that are worth a trillion dollars’. It is good, he noted, that industry bodies including the Australian Society of Authors andBook People, are working hard to address this issue of theft.
Robbie isn’t, on the other hand, concerned about AI taking over cultural production, pointing out that consumers generally want to know the provenance of the media they’re consuming.
Alerted to reports of AI-created books swamping Amazon’s site and messing up its ranking algorithm, his considered response was ‘Good!’
While conceding the ‘unbelievable’ delivery experience Amazon offers, he also has ‘an environmental bent’ and ‘when you deliver thousands of small packages it clogs our roads up’ and, at the level of society, is actually not efficient.
Should book prices go up? This, Robbie noted, is a sensitive question. But, aided by attendees recalling the prices of titles from twenty years ago, he acknowledged that ‘Books are very cheap, really’. This doesn’t mean, though, that fixed book prices, which some have been calling for in Australia, are going to return. For Robbie, ‘It’s not going to happen.’
He likes the trend towards beautifully produced print books. Hardbacks, special editions, deckled edges, people weeping over new editions in Waterstones on BookTok … ‘I like all that’.
In discussion, members spoke of the high input costs they’re facing, of the effect this has on their ability to compete on price, and of associated difficulties they’re facing in getting titles into some bookstores. Small publishers continue to suffer on margins because they can’t readily access volume discounts.
A print management agency, it was noted, was one possible step to countering this disadvantage. ‘Maybe we should think about [forming] a printing company?’ Robbie wondered.
Distribution was also raised, with members reporting their current experiences and options canvassed and assessed.
‘At the moment’, Robbie said, ‘we’re in a rut. No-one’s got any money because of Australian property prices.’
Over the sound of people slapping their thighs in agreement and calling for the Reserve Bank Board to be put in stocks and tomatoed, he continued: ‘I must say one thing. We’re in a risk-aversion stage with publishing. It’s getting boring. I can’t take any more Bluey. And you guys’, the independents, ‘are in the position of taking the risks.’
Towards the end of the session I noted that I had been struck recently by the power of a particular formulation about the value of books and reading I had come across: ‘“I believe in books. They’re the superior way to absorb complex narratives, stories, and information. There is no other totally immersive art form.” Robbie, who said that?’
‘I said that!’
He had indeed said that. And isn’t this immersion in our own minds what we most need, and what is most difficult to protect at the moment in the face of the so-called attention economy? The constant harassment and exploitation of our attention by Big Tech? Aren’t books part of the antidote to this?
This is part of the reason why at SPN we’ve supported other like-minded bodies in the Australia Reads campaign.
Robbie, you’re a champion. Thank you! (And I will buy that novel when you finish writing it, no matter how postmodern it is.)
Nathan Hollier