Books+Publishing
Australian trade magazine
Books+Publishing (formerly Bookseller+Publisher and Australian Bookseller & Publisher) is a news outlet reporting on the Australian book industry. Published as a website with daily newsletters and a print magazine, the outlet produces industry news about publishing, bookselling, libraries, rights sales, literary awards and literary festivals, as well as author interviews and pre-publication reviews of Australian and New Zealand books.
History
Books+Publishing was founded as a magazine in 1921 by Daniel Wrixon Thorpe as the Australian Stationery and Fancy Goods Journal, at a time when there were few Australian retailers solely focused on the sale of books. The magazine has been continuously published ever since, changing its name to Ideas in 1937. The name then changed to Australian Bookseller & Publisher in 1971 when the D. W. Thorpe company was taken over by Thorpe's daughter, Joyce Nicholson.
In 1971, the company began publishing the Weekly Book Newsletter—an offshoot of the magazine—containing weekly book-industry news and became colloquially known as the Blue News, because of the blue paper it was printed on.
The D. W. Thorpe company was sold to Reed Reference Publishing in 1992, then sold to R. R. Bowker in 2001, and the company became Thorpe-Bowker in 2003. (R. R. Bowker is currently owned by ProQuest.)
The word 'Australian' was dropped from the magazine's title at the start of 2006 to become Bookseller+Publisher, partly in acknowledgement of Australia's growing role as a publishing and bookselling hub for the entire Asia-Pacific region. In 2006 the Weekly Book Newsletter became an online newsletter that is emailed to subscribers and available on the website.
The publication was renamed to Books+Publishing in 2012, and the newsletter Library News that Thorpe-Bowker had acquired in 2007 was folded into the renamed publication.
“Books+Publishing” enters the record as australian trade magazine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Books, Publishing and Australian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Books+Publishing” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Books, Publishing and Australian provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4943300. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1937, 1971 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Books+Publishing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.