Waterstone’s St Margaret’s Street Canterbury photos, the end of an era, some old pictures of Ramsgate Harbour and Thanet Internet.

Are you local internet savvy? How do you use the internet to find out what’s going on locally? Here in Thanet we seem to lack an obvious social media site where people can comment about local matters – that is unless I’ve missed it.

The main (largest number of members) Facebook Page was Thanet Chat, which has now closed, the remaining viable pages with more than 1,000 members seem to be:- 

New Thanet Watch https://www.facebook.com/groups/747896371999294/

Friends of Ramsgate Seafront https://www.facebook.com/groups/1591056714503080/

We Love Ramsgate https://www.facebook.com/groups/516220578418850/

Thanet - It’s Rubbish Here Isn’t it? https://www.facebook.com/groups/257762494415612/ 

Does anyone know something I don’t? is there somewhere else I should be looking, is there somewhere else I should be posting my eclectic posts about local history, local books and local matters?

Next the photos of Waterstone’s St Margaret’s Street Canterbury, which is closing today, this was the largest bookshop in East Kent and I think it closing is a significant milestone.

Why do I think this is important given that you can get all the books it had in stock on the internet? I think the key here is that you can’t have a proper look at them before you buy them. And yes I do know we have other Waterstone’s bookshops, Rose Lane in Canterbury, Westwood Cross, Folkestone and Ashford, but none of them awe anything like as big.

For me this is the second really bad shop closing in Canterbury, the last one was Chromos the main artist’s material supplier in East Kent, fortunately we still have Lovelys in Cliftonville Margate.

We do now of course have lots of other places selling artist’s materials but they just don’t have the high-end range.

Finally the old photos of Ramsgate Harbour

David Cameron and a plea for UK towns

David Cameron

Retailing’s not such a good thing-

It has its little ways.

And now sometimes no one buys much

For days and days and days.

A little more policing,

And slightly better roads

Some better cheaper parking,

Could help us loads and loads

And Oh! Mr Cameron, if you love us at all.

Walking around our town centres today, it’s my day off, I was struck by how few shops are actually real retail businesses, and how at some point the rest, charity shops, eateries, estate agents, solicitors and so on will work without the ordinary retail shops that brought them there in the first place.

I think this is a problem that is beyond local government, so I am considering a direct appeal to the national government.

Whops sorry about that I seem to have left his left lapel off.

Reflections from the book trade.

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.