I hate this time of year, the end of the financial year. It’s when we find out how many books have been stolen from our shelves. You’d think I’d get used to it, but I never quite do. This year the value of the items stolen has increased by 30% to $175,000. It’s upsetting; with that money we could have given our hardworking staff a bigger bonus and also put some extra money into theReadings Foundation. I read an interesting article the other day which posited that normally ethical people give themselves a license to steal – they rationalise that they’ve helped out a colleague, given $20 to a homeless person, donated to a charity, or they’ve spent a lot at Readings and Readings won’t miss it and they are in a rush. In their minds, it’s not really stealing. Authors and publishers also suffer when people don’t pay at bookshops; when we sell a book our software sends an alert that we need to get another copy. The people who forget to pay for a book don’t tell us that they are taking the last copy of Kate Grenville’s The Lieutenant. So we don’t know that it’s gone. Normally, we sell three copies of The Lieutenant a week and Kate gets a royalty from those sales. I did a rough calculation and Kate lost around twelve weeks of royalties – and her publisher Text also lost their profits.

Happily, there are also some positive trends in the book world that we can reflect on at this time of year. Bruce Pascoe’s history of Aboriginal settlements and farming, Dark Emu, has helped toreframe the way we see the first settlers of Australia. It’s also been a publishing sensation. Bookscan figures show that its two editions have sold over 100,000 copies since it was published in 2014 and 64,000 of those were sold over the last year, so its sales are increasing. Last month, Bruce brought out a version for younger readers, Young Dark Emu, which sold out its first print run of 13,000. At an event Readings hosted during the school holidays, Bruce told the audience of kids and their parents that he was using the money from Dark Emu to employ Aboriginal people on his farm near Mallacoota, where they are growing crops of the foods that were farmed by Indigenous Australians over millennia. Bruce is hopeful that books such as his are helping to change the perception of Indigenous Australian cultures. If the success of Dark Emu and other recent books by Indigenous authors is anything to go on, then things are heading in the right direction. According to Bookscan, the children’s book Welcome to Country by Aunty Joy Murphy and Lisa Kennedy has sold 13,500 copies; Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, 12,000 copies; and Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton, 21,000 copies (a version of this book for younger readersis due in September). This year’s releases from Tony Birch (The White Girl) and Tara June Winch (The Yield) have also been popular. We can look forward to two new books on Indigenous culture in the coming months: in September, Text has Sand Talk – How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta, and in October Hardie Grant will publish Finding the Heart of the Nation by Thomas Mayor, on the Uluru statement.

Mark Rubbo is the managing director of Readings.