A new Oxford Street Waterstone’s opening soon.
I love a good bookshop. I’m addicted to them. Yes – I certainly use Amazon a great deal, but browsing is something that simply can’t be replicated online. If you go to Amazon – despite the store’s best efforts, it’s hard to replicate the browsing feeling you get in a good bookshop. There’s no easy way for a cover to catch your eye, for a display or table to tempt you over. You go to an online store. You look up the book and then you buy or you don’t. You discover that people who bought the book you’re looking at also bought Dan Brown and the Ant and Dec book. It doesn’t help you.
So I like to support local bookshops. Where I live that means Waterstones. But curiously they’ve just started using some of that valuable front of store space in my local branch to display DVDs. They aren’t “literary” DVDs – just the top twenty. And the prices are pretty poor.
Here’s the thing: if I want a top twenty DVD on the high street, I can also visit any supermarket, WH Smiths or an HMV. My local Waterstones is two shops away from the nearest WH Smiths which has a significantly better DVD section. It’s also directly opposite a branch of HMV. Waterstones is owned by HMV – they’re sister companies. HMV has a vastly better range of DVDs, and they sell them at far more attractive prices.
In other words, you’d be a complete fool to buy a DVD in Waterstones.
We’re entering the fourth quarter of the year, and since most people only buy a minimal number of books a year – mostly as Christmas gifts – an incredible 40% of annual trade is done between now and December.
Waterstone’s has by far the biggest high street book presence, so why get into DVDs? Every inch of space surely has to pay for itself. So turn over that valuable shelf space to books and scrap the DVDs. They’re irrelevant!
An interesting aside: book trade magazine The Bookseller recently reported on major problems that Waterstone’s is experiencing with it’s new central distribution “Hub”. This has brought hundreds of comments. Waterstone’s head office is so annoyed that they’ve ridiculously blocked access to The Bookseller’s site from all branches of Waterstone’s. Perhaps Waterstone’s is trying to replicate one of it’s books – 1984?