Someone should write a book about the economics of bookselling. Nothing about Britain’s 900 independent bookshops adds up.
I visited half-a-dozen on a book tour last week. Books have never been more beautiful and small shops never more creative in selling these lovely objects. Many indies have sofas or cafes. They all convene book groups (seven a week in the case of Simply Books in Bramhall, Cheshire). They work with schools, open late, host author talks and devote hours to free advice for the nation’s army of aspiring poets, publishers and playwrights.
Several indie owners I met are former teachers. Bookselling is longer hours, they say. One reports that his teacher’s salary matched the entire turnover in his first year of bookselling. “There was only one day I failed to make a sale,” he says cheerily.
Last week, the shops seemed twitchy. Partly this is seasonal: the next eight weeks will determine whether 10 months of losses become a profitable year thanks to the Christmas frenzy. But mostly they’re upset about discounting.
“Does Manchester United sell new shirts half price? Does Porsche offer 50% off its new model?” asks Richard Drake in Stockton-on-Tees’s Drake the Bookshop. He points at his unsold copy of Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage.
“Why does the book industry flog its flagship products half price?” Independents can’t sell a £20 book they buy (at best) for a tenner. But that’s how it’s been discounted by Waterstones. Amazon sells it for £9.
Pullman has criticised “absurd, destructive, and unsustainable” discounting. Last week, though, he was sharply criticised by bookshop-blogger The Secret Bookseller for signing 5,000 £35 special-edition copies of his new blockbuster – an exclusive available only at Waterstones.
When I last toured indie bookshops two years ago, there was ebullience at the peaking of Kindle sales and popular revulsion at Amazon’s tax arrangements. But no conventional economist could grasp how 900 indies are still in business. They are, because so much bookselling is done out of love. That’s wonderful, but the rest of us – and publishers producing special editions – must love them back.
All roads lead to congestion
Between bookshops, I mostly sat in traffic. And yet we repeat the decades-old mistake of fuelling more traffic with more roads. My austerity-hit county council has massively overspent on a dual carriageway “road to nowhere” around Norwich. In one of the least self-aware publicity stunts ever, it opened the road this weekend to people endangered by or excluded from this 70mph monstrosity – walkers and cyclists.
Will such stunts spark a revelation that these vast strips of asphalt public space could be used for far more positive purposes? When this road opens, the new bottlenecks it creates will lead to another new road despoiling the glorious Wensum Valley. Madness.
A peach of a read
Nature writers are a herbivorous bunch, but will talons unfurl for the contest to find the nation’s favourite nature book? Anyone can nominate a book via The Arts & Humanities Research Council website, but an expert panel will choose a shortlist (presumably to stop a Boaty McBoatface scenario). I hope there’s space on it for children’s books – my own love of nature having been joyfully augmented by everything from Brendon Chase to James and the Giant Peach.
• Patrick Barkham is a Guardian columnist
