Sadly one of the few remaining book chains in the UK has gone into receivership, and it seems we’ll shortly be seeing the end of Borders.
I’m immensely saddened by this. Few things make me as happy as wandering into a bookshop for a bit of a mooch around.
I’m lucky. I work in the centre of London, and can go to the big Waterstones in Piccadilly, Foyles or Blackwells in Charing Cross Road, or the academic Waterstones over in Gower Street. Then there are specialist shops like Forbidden Planet on Shaftsbury Avenue.
Earlier this year we lost specialist crime bookshop, Murder One. And now Borders – the whole chain – looks set to disappear. The vultures will be in, grabbing whatever they can at bargain prices.
I’ll especially miss the range of magazines that Borders carried. There’ll be basically nowhere else to get these now. A large WH Smiths is good – and carries a perfectly average selection of books too – but you won’t find the smaller titles that you’d perhaps never have discovered without a shop like Borders.
I recently had a moan about Waterstones, but we should be thankful for small mercies. At least there’s a chain left for people to visit. I do miss the range of books that it’d once have carried – or more precisely, advertised itself as carrying.
Lots of people have already said it, but the book market has changed substantially, and we find the market split into bestsellers, especially at this time of year, and the longer tail that seems to sell in large part online (with the best-sellers). The bigger titles are largely aimed at those people who only buy one or two titles a year. They’re cookery books from the TV chefs, celebrity autobiographies, or perennial favourites like the Guiness Book of Records (or “Guinness World Records” as it seems to have renamed itself). When the new Dan Brown book came out, the prices were ridiculous. Even allowing for the absurd cover price mark-ups which are designed purely to facilitate 50% off discounts, when supermarkets are selling the title at £5 a copy, taking a loss, they’re not really interested in bookselling per se. The title is just another loss-leader. And the competition means that much of the profit that might accrue from a guaranteed seller like that, is swept away.
So we see the same thing happening with books as is happening with music. Susan Boyle or Dan Brown will sell stacks to the middle-of-the-road supermarket shopper, but more difficult fare disappears.
Of course there are still the smaller independent bookshops. For them there’s no reason to offer Harry Potter, Dan Brown or Peter Kay at all. Buy those books with your groceries. They’ll rely on other titles.
But I worry about them. Again, I’m lucky. In London there are still a fair few scattered around. And they exist outside London too – but not in as many locations. And people still do things like go to the shop and then check the price on Amazon. And walk away…
I love Amazon. I do lots of shopping on Amazon. But I also use physical shops. Because I know if I don’t, I’ll miss them when they’re gone. The serendipity of bookshops (and music and DVD shops) is unrepeatable online. Amazon’s “other customers bought…” is not the same at all. I’m talking about going in to buy a novel, and coming out with a biography of someone I’d hitherto not heard of before. Covers are very important by the way. You definitely do judge books by them.
If I was Waterstones (or WH Smiths) I’d work on the following things:
1. Have as accurate as possible stock takes. Allow customers to purchase books on the shelves via the web and have them picked from shelves and held. While Argos’s strict stock control system allows the ultimate of this kind of purchasing, shops like Currys, Comet and PC World manage it too. Books are a bit different, since only single copies of backlist titles might be held by stores, and if customers have replaced them in the wrong shelves this could be problemmatical. I wonder if widespread use of RFID might simplify stock checks and solve some of these issues?
2. Ensure that your physical stores can receive next day delivery of titles. Amazon can do this, so it’s essential that your stores can do this as well. Stories surrounding the introduction of Waterstones’ “Hub” issues are scary.
3. Give some control back to the managers and stores themselves. My local Waterstones, previously an Ottakers, understands its market pretty well and gets a good range of local authors in, or footballers from Arsenal and Spurs. They’re on target. But then they use valuable shelf space to sell DVDs despite the shop sitting directly opposite a specialist DVD retailer owned by the same parent company – HMV! Let the managers stock books according to local needs and don’t manage at a head office level.
4. Simplify in-store promotions. In particular, if a title has got a “marked up” RRP – for example the latest Jamie Oliver tome is marked up at £26. Nobody is ever expected to sell it at that price. So don’t. Discount all your hardbacks by a minimum of a pound. Amazon does at least this. Immediate gratification will mean that even if you’re a little more than Amazon, you might get the sale. But if you’re selling a book for twenty quid and it’s only fourteen on Amazon, then you probably won’t. Split the difference at the very least. There are lots of arguments over the rights and wrongs of the abolition of the Net Book Agreement, but since it’s gone, work outside it. I realise that this impacts on profits – what I don’t know is to what extent. But surely a smaller profit is better than no profit at all?
5. Don’t worry about stationary. Yes a few Moleskin diaries and pads is fine, but honestly, there’s a Rymans in my High Street too. And they’re probably cheaper.
There’s plenty more in the digital realm that might be considered. Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing quotes Clay Shirky at length today, and also examines possibilities surrounding print on demand. When those in-store printing presses come down in price a bit, then things start to get really interesting for print on demand. I’ve seen the machine in Blackwells in Charing Cross Road, but not really seen how to choose a book to print. Something to do in the future perhaps.
Yes retailing has to change – it always has, and it always will. I still remember the complicated palaver you used to have to suffer in Foyles to buy a book that involved queuing three times: get a chit from first desk; go to cash desk to pay; go back to first desk to collect book. However the publishing industry will be damaging itself if it doesn’t adapt. And hopefully, that will still involve shops where I can browse books and buy them!