Leserskring : the story of South Africa’s most successful commercial book club

Abstract

Nasionale Pers established a mail-order book club based on the Bertelsmann model called Leserskring in 1980. The club became incredibly successful and by 1985 it had a membership of 250,000. However, technology and a changing South African landscape brought challenges to the club. In 2016, Naspers announced that the iconic book club’s doors would be shut for good. Some believe that the club experienced its success due to the culture of reading and publishing that had developed among mostly white South Africans during the apartheid period, and that with democratisation the niche it once held slowly started to disappear.