I was saddened to hear that Albion Bookshops in Broadstairs and Cliftonville are to close, this doesn’t effect Albion secondhand bookshop in Broadstairs which will remain open.It has been said that for a town to be a proper town it has to have a bookshop, for me theatre, library, butcher, baker, grocer, green grocer, fishmonger and so on are all essential, however with the interminable yellow lines and the rising value of real estate and hence shop rents, the future doesn’t look very promising.
With bookshops there is another factor, it’s fairly complicated but I will bore you all with it anyway. In the UK we had a thing called the net book agreement, this meant that the publisher fixed the price of a book and it was illegal to sell the book new under that price. What this meant was that a supermarket couldn’t buy huge quantities of the new Harry Potter and sell it cheaper than the bookshops. This meant that the bookshops, an arts facility, didn’t need to be subsidised like other arts facilities because of the profits from mass-market bestsellers.
The overheads of bookshops were relatively low and the discounts to bookshops about 35% off of retail so that in the case of a book selling for £10 the bookseller got £3.50 the author £1 and the publisher £5.50 the overall effect of this was that books in the UK were the cheapest in the world.
The supermarkets and the big chain bookshops managed to end the net book agreement by saying that price fixing was unfair to the customer, so now most books are bought from publishers by a few very powerful retail chains that expect a minimum discount of 60% so with the same £10 book selling through Amazon Waterstones Tesco and so on the bookseller gets £6 The author £1 and the publisher £3.
Publishers have resolved this by increasing the price of books in real terms so that now apart from the promotional titles where the big chain retailer reduces their profit cut, books in the UK are now amongst the most expensive in the world.
Always been a book person - but never worked in the industry.
ReplyDeleteI remember well the net book agreement. From all know I'm sure it was a good thing.
But now its gone I guesss there is no getting it back - so what is the solution for the future?
I suspect that the problem for books (and their lovers) is the same as the supermarket domination of most things in Britain.
A few big retailers almost control what can be bought and can put suppliers out of business... as well as smal / independent retailers. In some other countries the expansion of 'supermarkets' is limited to protect the wider economy.
In relation to books, I have read somewhere that the number of books bought (and read) in the UK has greatly increased in recent years - so it could be argued that cheap books are a good thing?
On the other hand - I worry when I see books for sale in The Biggest Supermarket at typically £2-£4...
eg. Can the authors really be paid much out of that?
I could go on and on...
Mrs TP what we stand to lose here is our towns, the big chain retailers develop as parasites in our towns, often to the detriment of our architectural heritage, having all but killed the host they then leave it to die. We have managed to maintain a boycott on out of town shopping since December and looking at our budget what we lost in food price savings we have gained in petrol price savings. Certainly travelling by any form of motorised transport to engage in all shopping and leisure isn’t environmentally sustainable, if like me you want you children to be able to breathe when they reach middle age then there is strong argument for maintaining our shops where we live.
ReplyDeleteAnd no the publishers are changing author’s royalties to a percentage of trade price and not retail, all my authors get 10% of retail and I refuse to supply at discounts above 40%.