BOOKSHOPS FACING CHALLENGES FROM WEAK CONSUMER SPENDING - Booksellers the world over have received a welcome fillip from sales of the ''50 Shades of Grey'' adult fiction trilogy. The first novel in the series has broken all sorts of records and has become one of the fastest in history to reach a million copies sold. But traditional book retailers are looking at huge challenges, including rising competition from ebooks.
Mary Healy, buyer at independent book wholesaler Argosy, says the biggest challenge facing the book market is the recession and a fall in consumer spending. The book market is struggling with sales down 11% and she says the ebook market is not their biggest concern as ebooks still make up only 8% of the market. Best sellers like ''50 Shades of Grey'' helps the overall book market as people come into a bookshop to buy the bestseller and usually end up buying more books as they browse through the shop. Describing ''50 Shades of Grey'' as a phenomena she says that 100,000 copies were shipped into Ireland and 50,000 of these were sold in the first couple of months. 1.8m were printed in the UK and were sold out, with another batch set to hit the shops soon.
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MORNING BRIEFS - ARI, the airport retail company owned by the Dublin Airport Authority, has broken into the Chinese market. It will operate 11 shops at the new Changshui International Airport at Kunming in South West China which opened this morning. The shops will operate under The Loop brandname which travellers passing through Dublin, Shannon and Cork Airports will be familiar with.
*** The EU's permanent bailout mechanism the ESM will, subject to some conditions, be able to lend directly to banks on request from a member state without the resulting ESM loan being added to government debt. That was how Spain wanted its bank bailout to be handled. Germany had objected but has now backed down - provided any member states requesting this type of aid sign a memorandum of understanding setting out their policies to address their debt and deficit issues and a timetable over which their targets are to be achieved.
*** Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays bank, is under pressure to resign in the wake of the interest rate rigging scandal. Barclays this week was fined a record £290m by regulators in the US and UK after admitting that its employees had colluded to try to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate or Libor to help Barclay's own traders maximise their profits. Libor is a benchmark interest rate which influences the cost of funding for banks and ultimately for businesses and consumers. In a statement clearly directed at Bob Diamond, British Prime Minister David Cameron said "people have to take responsibility for their actions" and "it's important that goes all the way to the top of the organisation". In an excerpt from its editorial published on the front page of the FT today the newspaper labels Barclays' actions "a corrosive con". The FT says that if Mr Diamond "had an ounce of shame he would immediately step down".
*** The Central Bank's investigation into the fitness and probity of directors of Irish banks has cleared all of them to remain in their current roles. That includes Kevin Murphy at Irish Life and Permanent and Richie Boucher at Bank of Ireland. They are the only remaining directors at any Irish institutions who were in place in the run-up to the 2008 banking crisis.
*** The euro jumped 1.1% in trading this morning to $1.265 after the euro zone deal. That is its biggest one day gain against the dollar in eight months.
