Exclusive Books is one of South Africa's largest

bookselling Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is the retail and distribution end of the publishing process. People who engage in bookselling are called booksellers, bookdealers, bookpeople, bookmen, or bookwomen. The founding of librari ...

chains with stores throughout South Africa, and one store in

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Botswana Botswana (, ), officially the Republic of Botswana ( tn, Lefatshe la Botswana, label= Setswana, ), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory being the Kal ...

and one in

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Namibia Namibia (, ), officially the Republic of Namibia, is a country in Southern Africa. Its western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Zambia and Angola to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and e ...

. As of 1 December 2013, the chain is owned and operated by a private group of investors. It was previously owned by the Times Media Group (TMG), after TMG took control of

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History

In 1951, Pam Joseph, in partnership with Philip Joseph's mother, Pauline, purchased a small second-hand bookshop in the centre of Johannesburg and renamed it Exclusive Books. Philip Joseph expanded the business by setting up a further branch in 1954 in Hillbrow, then one of the most densely populated areas in the world. The bookstore offered late night and Sunday trading, contributing to its growth. The Hillbrow store closed in 1993, and within the same year, the Hyde Park store became the group's flagship. It was the largest bookshop of its kind in Southern Africa at the time. In 1998, it launched the Fanatics loyalty program, which grew to a membership of 170,000 members by 2001. In 1999, Exclusive Books introduced Seattle Coffee Company cafés adjoining eighteen of the book stores. Until 2012, they sponsored an annual book prize called the Exclusive Books Boeke Prize. On 22 September 2013, it was announced that Exclusive Books – and its sister company Van Schaik Bookstore – was being sold by TMG to a private consortium led by Medu Capital for R435 million. At the conclusion of this sale, the company briefly traded under the name ''Jadeite Trading (Pty) Ltd Trading As Exclusive Books'', before being re-registered as ''Exclusive Books Group (Pty) Ltd''. On 21 August 2014, the company announced its new brand and a shift in its corporate focus, including the introduction of its own café brand, EB Café. In July 2017, Market Theatre Foundation partnered with Exclusive Books. In June 2020, Exclusive Books announced that it would host all upcoming book launches online via

Zoom Zoom may refer to: Technology Computing * Zoom (software), videoconferencing application * Page zooming, the ability to magnify or shrink a portion of a page on a computer display * Zooming user interface, a graphical interface allowing for imag ...

, to comply with the Covid-19 regulations in place.

Corporate social responsibility

In 2002, in a move to formalize the

corporate social responsibility Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a form of international private business self-regulation which aims to contribute to societal goals of a philanthropic, activist, or charitable nature by engaging in or supporting volunteering or ethicall ...

programme, Exclusive Books established the Exclusive Books Reading Trust. The three trustees are

Zakes Mda Zakes Mda ( ), legally Zanemvula Kizito Gatyeni Mda (born 1948) is a South African novelist, poet and playwright and he is the son of politician A. P. Mda. He has won major South African and British literary awards for his novels and plays. He is ...

, Mandla Langa, and Brian Wafawarowa. The Reading Trust was established to fund literacy, library and reading projects around South Africa. Through the Reading Trust Exclusive Books has opened libraries in Cape Town and Limpopo and has donated thousands of books every year to various organizations and charities.

E-commerce

The first Exclusive Books

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain mana ...

site was launched as ExclusiveBooks.com and went live in 1999. In 2010, this was replaced by Exclus1ves.co.za, which was one of the first e-commerce sites in South Africa to incorporate

gamification Gamification is the strategic attempt to enhance systems, services, organizations, and activities by creating similar experiences to those experienced when playing games in order to motivate and engage users. This is generally accomplished thro ...

, they now operate as Exclusivebooks.co.za.

References

External links

Exclusive Books
Companies based in Johannesburg Multinational companies headquartered in South Africa {{SouthAfrica-company-stub