An Obadiah Slope Column
A computer crash: Obadiah was worried back when he worked for Bible Society when the project to rebuild the website, point of sales, warehousing inventory, and book buying systems of the Koorong bookselling operation was launched, in what seemed to him like a huge risk. He was not the only worried staffer. Your columnist is not accusing anyone of being cavalier, just recalling his thoughts at the time.
Your columnist was aware of two previous grim tales of adventurous computer system upgrades sinking two large Christian Bookchains in the UK, St Stephen’s (high church liberal) and Wesley Owen (evangelical.) Several of the larger Wesley Owen stores had been bought by Koorong’s founders, the Bootes family, so at least one of those grim stories was known.
It is fair to say that there was a time bomb of sorts lurking within Koorong when the Bible Society took it over in 2015. The website, which was becoming steadily more important for a book-selling operation in the Amazon age, was built around some MS-DOS coding – a program called “Distrib” which had been widely used in Australian booksellers.
But a panoply of upgrades had been built around it in-house, so the Koorong operation had several decades of in-house bespoke coding that meant maintenance was largely dependent on the corporate memory of IT staffers. A rebuild was inevitable, along with the risks involved.
The figures tell the story. As reported by The Other Cheek, successive deficits of $17,350,000 and $14,913,000 in the last two years and likely more in earlier years have meant disaster for the Bible society.
It’s not the sort of disaster that puts the Bible Society and its work in peril. But it is a big loss.
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Unlike the UK Christian bookchains that suffered huge losses with bungled computerisation projects, Koorong has been rescued. Excelsia University College, backed by philanthropists Phil Cave and Richard Grellman, have purchased the bookchain, and have already extended the bookshop network by one, in the Pennant Hills building that now houses the College. Koorong, the main means of Australians getting hold of Christian literature, certainly in a physical bookstore, is in safe hands.
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Happy 2026: A local New Year parade is not something that Obadiah sees in his adopted hometown of Sydney, but back in SA, it seems to be a country tradition. So on a balmy New Year’s Eve, Yankallilla and beachside Normanville on the gulf coast south of Adelaide got treated to the works, pirates, a giant seagull, dancers, and a heap of emergency trucks with lots of lollies tossed off floats for the kids. And a special appearance by the combined churches.
The Bible Society Australia financial records of 2016 ACNC) state that the BSA purchased Koorong on the 1st July 2015 for $18.5 million dollars which included a loan of $6.5 million to a secured lender. The purchase price included $15 million of assets and stock at their book value, plus $3.5 million of goodwill. While buying a declining business stock at its book value is questionable enough from an accounting perspective, this would seem to have been a poor decision given Koorong’s albeit popular discount regime potentially meant the book stock had a retail worth (20% less) of only $12 million. The goodwill on a business is always based upon its brand popularity and market presence, however this dramatically reduces if the business is in decline. The theoretical stock overvalue of $3 million plus goodwill of $3.5 million may have represented an overvaluation of $6.5 million which is a lot to recuperate from operational revenue which was already under stress, and given the purchase drained the cash reserves. This is not a criticism of any staff or management of the brand but an accounting and business general perspective. The loss reported in the ACNC financial reports which are publicly available, show a loss of $18 million being approximately equal to the original purchase price. It is of interest that I was in the Koorong cafe one time where a conversation was underway between a fellow and a younger woman. The woman appeared to be interested in starting a Christian bookstore of her own and was seeking some advice. The man responded by stating “the problem is that we (book sellers) are all competing with each other trying to sell the same books to the same small Christian market”. Koorong was sold to BSA not long after. It seems that the Eternity newspaper masthead was underestimated in its beneficial influence to the business, beyond pure profit KPIs but its intangible value as an attractant. It was very popular among Christian readers and thus a powerful marketing tool for Koorong products, plus the accessibility of its advertising and jobs, and the closure of Eternity News on April 30 2024 appears to have been very detrimental. Eternity was closed in two stages firstly by down grading it from a newspaper masthead to an insular soft church newsletter journal, and secondly complete closure in 2024. The BSA financial report of 2024 states Eternity was closed following “a review of its media ministry and contribution to BSA’s core bible mission and vision” which may be a reference to Eternity’s political reporting clashing with the broader Christian misguided notion of the separation of church and state – a notion which only began with the founding of the United States (after all, prior to that, the church was the government and the state!). The report added “the contribution Eternity has made to BSA and Christian media is significant”. Eternity’s journalism was of a professional level not seen before or since in Australia. We anticipate Koorong and its delightful cafe continues and hope for a return of the Eternity Newspaper, print and digital.
Use to surf the left hander near the old pier at Myaponga just down the road from Yankalilla. Some great memories with the Christian Surfers crew from Adelaide via Christie’s Beach. Having worked as National Public Relations Director for the Bible Society more than 20 years ago the structural and budgetary problems were evident then and what we are seeing today is its incremental evolution. You could have written the script back then off the back of the simple and myopic reductionism of board members. Sad but predictable that the river has flowed the way it has.