By Adam Fulton
SYDNEY bookshops are struggling with falling sales at their busiest time of year as buyers, buoyed by the strong Australian dollar, snap up books from overseas via the internet or move to electronic reading devices.
''It's very quiet,'' the general manager of Pages and Pages Booksellers in Mosman, John Page, said. ''Everyone's down. It's not really a book thing; retail in general is very quiet.''
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Bookseller estimates of the drop in business from this time last year varied from 5 per cent to 20 per cent.
''If it was down by 20 per cent there won't be any bookshops around in the new year. That would close us,'' David Gaunt, the co-owner of Gleebooks in Glebe, said. But his shop was increasingly having to discount books.
''Most of us might do 80 per cent of our business in the month and a half before Christmas,'' he said. ''We'll be OK but, generally speaking, it's clearly a quieter Christmas.''
Big chains were also hit. At Dymocks sales were ''reasonable - it's not stellar'', the buying manager, Sophie Groom, said.
At Abbey's Bookshop in the city, this month was ''relatively good'' only because of a poor November, said its general manager, Adrian Hardingham.
''There's a lot of pressure from people being able to buy on the internet from overseas. And of course we're restricted - we've got to charge GST, for example, which overseas bookstores don't have to. With the exchange rate being so good, you can see why they do it.''
A jump in the sales of electronic reader devices was also hitting book sales. At Borders a wi-fi e-reader was the No.1 Christmas seller, said its marketing manager, Marissa Doyle.
Ms Groom said Dymocks had sold e-readers since 2007 but ''suddenly there's been a lot more interest over the past 12 months''.
Memoirs figure large in sales, led by the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards's Life, the former prime minister John Howard's Lazarus Rising and The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry.
My Life Story, by the former Aussie Rules footballer Ben Cousins, topped the sports table, and How To Make Gravy, the part-memoir of the people's poet, Paul Kelly, was the other strongest music seller.
''It's a really non-fiction-led Christmas,'' Ms Groom said.
There were exceptions. The runaway hit The Diary of a Wimpy Kid: the Ugly Truth, the final instalment in Jeff Kinney's series, dominated children's books.
Richelle Mead's Last Sacrifice - the last of the Vampire Academy books - was also selling strongly. So, too, were tales from Di Morrissey's The Plantation, Bryce Courtenay's Fortune Cookie and Patricia Cornwell's Port Mortuary, as well as the Man Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson.
Travel books, led by Lonely Planet, were moving at such volumes it ''amazed'' Barbara Horgan, the co-owner of Shearer's Bookshop in Leichhardt.
''Obviously with the dollar the way it is, there are a lot of people planning trips.''