Jo McColl

For booksellers and most retailers, the Rugby World Cup was the spark that did not ignite. Instead of ringing tills, foot traffic was down by half in Auckland’s Newmarket shopping area. In New Plymouth, Benny’s Books put up the bunting and stocked up on rugby titles – but nobody came despite three high profile matches in the city.

RWC tourists visited bookshops in Greymouth and Wanaka – to buy maps. Union, the big lead rugby book for the event, hasn’t even made it on to Nielsen BookScan’s top ten non-fiction list.

Couldn’t get to conference? Here's a quick and easy summary.

Booksellers are suffering in the current recovery-from-recession phase, but speakers at Booksellers Conference last weekend projected a confident future. Yes, e-books will impact on trade – but ABA’s Len Vlahos showed how they can work for independent booksellers.

The Read will cover the key speakers in detail over following issues, but right now here’s the conference in a capsule:

Unity Books Wellington has just renewed the lease on their Willis Street premises for a lengthy period, so it is good to see such defiance of doom and gloom. The store will also grow larger when Unity’s landlords refurbish the frontage of their building and Unity incorporates part of the entrance lobby into the shop. Tilly Lloyd is not unmindful of the risks, but is “reasonably confident that the paper book will continue to exist and will be needed”. She says, "The refit will be something like a second revised edition".

Unity Books is certainly a valued Wellington institution and has weathered a few challenges since the store was founded in 1967 by Alan Preston.