I’m not sure but I think I may have got this picture from the always-wonderful Age of Uncertainty, the blog of a dry, observant bookselling type.
So Borders is in administration, in closing-down sales, in history, baby. Where did it all go wrong? It ate the indie bookshops. Now it’s been eaten by Amazon. Even the death of the Net Book Agreement wasn’t enough to keep it going.I don\’t think I can go to the sales this time. For one thing I’ve just had a week off with flu, unpaid. For another, I’ve been – not knowing I was about to have a week off unpaid – on an Abe-spree, buying books on and by James, Wilde and their ilk. And thirdly I spent £90 in the last borders closing-down sale, and that may be my lot. They’ve saturated my market, as the actress said to the bishop…
But I do have a couple of questions about the death of the Net Book Agreement, if it isn’t too late to ask them now. I mean, it ended in 1994 or something. But, as with the right-to-buy of council houses ten years before that, everything the doomsayers predicted has come true. Yet here we are, and we’re going, “ohmigosh, it’ll be Amazon,” but we’re forgetting what made the whole clambake possible in the first place. Because I well remember a time when a book cost what it cost, and you either paid it or you didn’t. Somehow, unbelievably, we all had enough to read back then. We splurged on the odd hardback, waited for the rest to come into paper, and stocked up on second-hand. Weird, huh. (It’s like, how did clothes even fit people before lycra? Ever think of that?)
First, here’s Tom Sutcliffe, in a local indie bookshop, in the Independent:
I noticed that Richard Dawkins had published a new book and then noticed that the hardback price was £20 and hesitated. And then I went home and discovered that Amazon would deliver it to my door for £9.99. No wonder, really, that Amazon’s share price recently topped what it was during the dotcom boom and that Borders was yesterday reported to be struggling for survival as a company. And if even a chain operation can’t compete with Amazon’s economies of scale what possible hope can there be for a small independent? How long before they require charitable status to operate at all?
Since then I’ve found myself wondering exactly how much of a premium I’d pay to keep that small bookshop in business…
…£10.01 per volume seems quite a steep surcharge to pay for such virtues (automatically, of course, I take the heavily discounted price as the “true” one – and the RRP as a kind of con).
He’s right, you know. We begin to take it for granted and we think that it actually costs something like £7 a unit to produce a giant heavily-researched hardback biography with copious indexes, photographs, etc. And with all those discounted current bestsellers, who’s going to pay £10 for some dreary old Penguin, just because some mate of theirs told them it was a good book?
So here’s what the Independent was saying about the Net Book Agreement (decline of) in 1994:
Arguments for keeping the agreement are that supermarkets would otherwise sell large quantities of a narrow range of bestsellers (cheaper without the NBA), cutting bookshop profits and forcing them to reduce their range. Fewer titles would be published, small booksellers would be unable to compete in the discounting wars and go under, print runs would shorten and the price of less popular books would rise to compensate for lower profits on bestsellers.
The opposing camp claims the NBA widens the range of books published, of which much is rubbish. Without it, publishers would be more discriminating, customers would be offered cheaper books and would, therefore, buy more, and literary interest would be stimulated.
Bill McGrath, chief executive of Pentos, owner of the Dillons chain, is among them. He says in the US, which has no pricing restrictions, expenditure a head on books is three times higher.
I’m not sure what that means or if we can rely on it. Though I think the word “discriminating” may have turned out to mean something different from what those people thought. I looked and looked, on my bed of flu, and could not find the stats I was looking for on British book buyers (and readers). I know I’ve seen them, so if anyone can help me out, it’ll be much appreciated. (And it also occurs to me that we might want to stop for a moment and reconsider just what we mean when we use the word “book” – but wait, we were talking about the viability or otherwise of Borders.
But, so, okay, I know we’re all like Cher and we can’t turn back time. But, like, when people are allowed to sell things at different prices. You can sell a stretchy black skirt for different prices, and even a skirt made by the same manufacturer for different prices. But you can’t sell a Gap skirt for a different price. You don;t see copies of Vogue being flogged at massive discounts in WH Smiths, where the corner shop has them at full price. You just don’t see companies offering iPods for £50 just to shift units.
So my question is this. Why is this happening to the book trade? What is this insane level of competition all about? It’s a failed bacterium that kills its host and itself along with it.
Answers on the back of a closing-down sign please.
Dear Katy
Before leaving for France, I bought two fat novels from Tesco’s in their ‘Two for seven quid deal.’ As I left the store I remember thinking ‘How could anyone possibly make a profit on that?’ In fact, books and CD’s are historically cheap in Britain at the moment which is why I advise people to buy them by the barrow-load.
Best wishes from Simon
The NBA isn’t going to come back, so we’ll carry on having books at discounted prices from chainstores and online stores, all attempting to undercut each other (‘predatory pricing’), and the publishers with the biggest overheads tailoring what they publish to sell to the biggest buyers, and the independents scratching their heads and yes, it’s a bloody mess. By the way, don’t France and Germany regulate against selling books at lower than cost? If so, can’t this be an EU thing? I’ve no idea. I’m no expert. In fact I’m not sure there ARE any experts, and this is one of the few hopeful things. The investment bankers were supposedly experts, the folk who ran Borders presumably thought themselves experts, and ditto the people who are writing articles about ‘the future of bookselling’. Meanwhile, despite the experts, some of the independents (Foyles, Daunts, some of the single shops too) seem to be staying alive at the very least. As an article of doubtless naive faith, I think books like water will find a way through.
From a US newspaper report on the book wars: ‘Since 1981, French law dictates that both large chain booksellers and independent booksellers sell the same titles at fixed prices. This has allowed small independent bookstores to maintain their businesses . . . Gallimard Publishing House editor Jean Mattern commented, “On a national level there is an extremely strong will to keep the diversity of these independent bookstores alive, because these stores serve as a kind of guarantee for the future of independent publishing as well.”’
As a person who is trying to sell his novel to a publisher, I see a book retailing industry that:
- routinely demands publishers offer a 50% discount – at least – on the cover price of a book before they’ll allow the book onto their shelves;
- sees nothing wrong in demanding that any stock they fail they sell must be bought back by the publisher, diminishing their exposure to risk;
- thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to demand massive payments for shelving a book near to the till, often on 3-for-the-price-of-2 discount tables;
… and I see publishers who are more than happy to go along with these arrangements. It’s a travesty of a business model, but what can you do?
Amazon are the wierdest of the lot: they demand a 50% discount on all books they list so that, as far as I can make out, they can then advertise the books as half-price offers. But that doesn’t mean the real cost of books has gone down: all that’s happened is that publishers double the cover price of the book so that they can continue to get the revenue stream they expect from the book. Nobody wins from this marketing strategy; many lose.
I remember the Net Book Agreement. I’m not convinced the system was any fairer than today’s madness. I also remember when the Post Office had a monopoly on the telephone system – and having to wait months to be allocated a phone number, having to pay money to have your phone number excluded from the phone book, the wide choice of colours and models handsets came in (not).
When is a cartel justifiable? The current bookselling business model is as much a cartel operation as the NBA used to be. We – writers, publishers, booksellers, readers – deserve something better. The next five years will no doubt be interesting times, yes?
It’s easy to gather a lot of depressing anecdotes about the state of the publishing industry. I was working earlier this year for an independent publisher who needed to consult Waterstone’s before deciding how many copies of a book they could print. I went to a talk from a marketing director who cheerfully detailed the joys of masterminding a Katie Price book launch. I saw a commissioning editor’s position that was described in terms of “Who do you like best? Amy, Lily or Cheryl?”
From my (admittedly atypical, I would think) experience of independent bookselling, there seemed to be no shortage of people willing to pay the cover price when in doing so they’re supporting people who will always greet them by name. Perhaps their worry is more that publishers will start publishing less and less of the kind of books they can sell to people with a straight face. I’m not so well traveled to be able to make this statement definitively, but in my forays into European bookshops I’ve never seen any indication that French or Swedish or Austrian or Slovakian publishing is becoming a adjunct of the prevailing show business/celebrity culture. I’m sure I am being somewhat elitist as well as over-egging the omelette. Perhaps these books subsidise the others, or perhaps the £2 the publisher pockets per unit from Amazon pays the huge advances of people who already benefit from a number of revenue streams.
And if the the publishing culture in non-Anglophone countries is any healthier (I mean in terms of a diverse base of independent bookshops and publishers, not in the be-all-and-end-all that is the sale of foreign rights), perhaps it’s bound up in a greater willingness to look abroad for talent. 3% here, 20-25% as a European average. I found a book in Slovakia that embodied all the principles I like to see more of here:a translated novella., beautifully illustrated and produced. I was very happy to pay full price for it (although the illustrated edition of Momo I bought in Austria for 41.50 euros was a little steep).
Pingback: booksellers! don’t digest the assets, man « Baroque in Hackney