A&R's strategy was, I was told some years ago by one of their senior executives, to go to war with the publishers and win. They looked to retailers like Woolworths as their model, with their crushing of the suppliers and producers as the key to making more money.

Ugly as all this was and hubristic as it has proved, there is no comfort for anyone in the failure of the two chains. Together they are believed to represent about 20 per cent of Australian book retailing. The independent bookstores account for about another 20 per cent. Combined, they were the segment of book retailing in which many of the books that matter most to an Australian identity and culture were sold. It was also here that the books we think important to a larger idea of our world and ourselves - novels, essays, poetry and histories - were sold.

Publishers needed that critical mass to push many books that otherwise might have been dubious commercially over the red line into a small profit. It meant a first novel, a history, a book of essays might just be able to sell 3000 copies. But with Borders and Angus & Robertson in voluntary administration, with the independents struggling and more and more closing, those days are perhaps gone. Many small publishers we have come to see as vital - Text, Black Inc, MUP to name a few - must be looking today at their future publishing schedules with very heavy hearts, wondering how on earth they can continue to make it all work.

Many large publishers will continue the process already begun of sacking staff and slashing their Australian lists, telling authors that despite their promise or their record that the market has vanished. To survive they will concentrate ever more on the books stocked by the discount department stores - Kmart, Big W and the like: celebrity titles, overseas mass-market hits, cookbooks. Here today and gone tomorrow books, ephemera, massively discounted by the department stores, sometimes below cost, as loss leaders that might drag the punter into the shop to make some other more profitable purchase.

It is of course a perfect storm - the ineptitude of a major player in REDgroup, the global financial crisis that slowed retail, a society increasingly besotted by price rather than value, the refusal of the government to either get rid of the GST on books or charge it on online purchases, the rise of e-books and the growth of online selling at the moment the Australian dollar reached record highs.