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Books mean big business. They can be bought from a huge number of places, including supermarkets, second-hand and independent bookshops, national retailers, and book catalogues, not to mention the online titan Amazon and the new trend of e-publishing. But all of these booksellers are fighting for survival. Our experience of buying books, and the British bookshop itself, is changing dramatically.
Book-buying hopefuls face a dilemma when it comes to tracking down their next novel. Between you, and future you curled up with a good book, lies an almost baffling range of booksellers. At one end of the book business are the second-hand bookshops. These, run either for charity or for profit, recycle well-thumbed fictions. There are bargain bookshops such as The Works, selling all kinds of fiction and non-fiction. Supermarkets, too, lure their regular customers down aisles of discounted bestsellers by promoting low prices. Selling books here, even as loss leaders, encourages add-on sales. Amazon can also afford to sell below its profit margins. And national retailers like WH Smith and Waterstone’s have to try and fight back.
Whilst second-hand bookshops seem to offer scrambling between stacks of decrepit books and choking through dust-clouds to find a reading relic, bright young fictions lounge sexily on the shelves of high-street retailers. But even these shiny avenues of books can make for perilous purchasing. Hugging an armful of seductive 3-for-2 bargains, you must negotiate wobbling piles of bestsellers threatening to rain down celebrity biographies in order to reach the till point and claim a free bookmark. Just don’t spill your skinny latte on the way. Coffee corners and chintzy sofas are among the attempts made by retailers to create a cosy living-room appeal. But customers are also going online to buy their books. And while this option is often considerably cheaper, it can’t always compensate for the luxury of having a physical nose at novels.
It was only twenty years ago that Waterstone’s first began to discount titles, following a precedent set by Dillons. For almost a century before, booksellers had conformed to the Net Book Agreement. They had agreed to sell novels at publisher-recommended prices. Publishers would then refuse to supply fiction to any store that undercut their costs. But because the agreement did not extend to damaged books, some shops had already begun to exploit this legal loophole by disfiguring them. In 1997, the NBA was judged to be against the public interest. Many independent shops closed, and the monopoly of high-street chains increased. American bookseller Borders came, sold novels, and left.
Even the supermarkets wedged their foot in the bookseller’s door, exacerbating the literary price war. This month, the collaboration of Sainsbury’s and Avon, a publishing division of HarperCollins, will give the supermarket the exclusive sale of three novels. For their head of books, ‘the deal will help to position Sainsbury’s as one of the leading booksellers in the UK.’ And while Waterstone’s profited at first, even taking over Ottakar’s, it has now had to be bought by a Russian billionaire. The changing ways in which books are being sold have created complicated, uneven relationships between writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers.
York itself has many fictional haunts that are a far cry from bookshops like that of Black Books, a TV programme that features Dylan Moran’s scruffy, boozy, customer-heckling bookseller. Highlights include the Oxfam Music and Bookshop on Micklegate, and all five floors of the Minster Gate Bookshop. The latter is situated on the former Bookland Lane; a name that stands tribute to the area’s history of bookselling since the 16th Century. And over one hundred thousand books will be up for sale at the York National Book Fair on the 10th and 11th September.
Finding fiction doesn’t have to be difficult. But the new faces of bookselling are prompting new questions; questions about where we should be buying our books, about selling out and devaluing fiction, and about the changing quality of the experience of buying a book itself.
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