Tag Archive - Australia

Love Books? Two bits of Aussie news …

July 5, 2011 in Australian Digital, Digital, Media with 0 Comments

There are two important news stories for Australian book lovers, and that includes all formats, but particularly the old fashioned physical ones.

  1. Pearson has acquired the ecommerce operations of RED Group, that’s the owner of Borders Australia and Angus & Robertson who went into administration earlier this year. (full article)
  2. Amazon has acquired Book Depository, the UK based e-tailer of books with free shipping worldwide and the place where Australians in the know bought their books at reasonable prices. (full article)

Why is this important?  Well, it means that there are major players out there who still believe in the potential of old fashioned books.  It also means that the Australian market remains attractive to global players.

Many stories have been written about how Australian ecommerce is poised to explode in the next few years as many household names begin to effectively use web and mobile to deliver shopping experiences.  This is exciting for the Australian consumer and for the digital industry that will support a new retail boom.

Let’s just hope that Amazon retains free shipping to Australia as the owner of Book Depository.  Otherwise, we’ll be back to artificially high prices or a switch to Kindle.

Aussie economy, or Aussie holidays?

May 31, 2011 in Australian Digital, Change with 0 Comments

Although I shared this image on Twitter when I first saw it this morning, I keep thinking about this chart and the many insights it provides not just about how air travel into Australia is organised, but also about how the economy that drives Australia works.

Surprises for me:  more seats inbound from New Zealand than North East Asia combined and nearly as many seats inbound from the Middle East as the United States.

New Zealand is a small country.  There are nearly 4m inbound seats to Australia – even with a shared economic area, that must signal a higher than expected economic dependency.  It can’t all be tourism.

It’s commonly known that there’s a strong economic link between Australia and Asia.  The north-east Asia volumes must be growing as China continues to develop and becomes ever more prominent in the region.  Living in Australia, it feels that there’s a strong link to the US, but the data suggests that this link might be one way or not as strong as it seems based strictly on in-person interaction (which is ultimately required to do business).

My next question is whether the Asian links are so high because they include the lion’s share of leisure travel, or is there a proportionate distribution of leisure and business travel across all routes?

Check out the infographic on the Adioso blog and check out Adioso’s flight search service while you’re at it.