It is with a heavy heart that after almost 30 years, we have made the difficult decision to cease trading under the Subbuteo Natural History Books brand.
The book market has changed significantly during this time. RRPs are no longer protected within the UK, e-books have become more popular at the expense of print and there is heavy competition from global companies whose name and general trading volumes mean they can demand far higher margins than we can. All of these factors combine to make trading in books extremely difficult.
On the reverse side, our core business, CJ WildBird Foods Ltd (of which, Subbuteo Natural History Books is a trading division), is doing exceptionally well. Our bird foods and wildlife care products are available throughout Europe under the CJ Wildlife and Vivara brands and we also source, manufacture and distribute on behalf of a number of third party wildlife organisations. The success and growth of this side of the business has bought about many new and exciting opportunities and continues to grow and develop.
Both of these factors together have led us to the difficult but necessary choice to focus on the wildlife aspect of the business and reduce our focus on the specialist natural history book titles. The Subbuteo webshop therefore ceases to trade from this point onwards.
If you have a book on order please do not worry we will honour this and you can continue to call and email the service team for support.
We are definitely not ceasing to offer books altogether either, just offering them in a different way and ultimately in a more targeted subject area. The options are as follows:
We will continue to stock a wide range of European wildlife books on our CJ and Vivara webshops.
We will also continue to offer a range of books on the specialist shops that we manage:
We will also offer a range of specialist titles, while stocks last, on our Ebay store.
In addition to this if you cannot see what you need we will always try to help - whether that be by offering it as an item for sale or simply using our network/archives to advise you where it can be sourced from.
We hope that in these ways we can still continue to serve you. We also want to thank you very much for your custom and support over the years.
Best wishes,
All at Subbuteo Natural History Books