The Diary of a Bookseller

TUESDAY, 18 FEBRUARY

Online orders: 5

Books found: 3

One of today’s online orders was about a nature reserve in Zimbabwe called Wankie.

This morning I received a message from Amazon informing me that our online performance had dropped from Good to Fair and that if it doesn’t improve they’ll suspend my account. One of the principal pleasures of self-employment is that you don’t have to do what the boss tells you. As Amazon marches on with its ‘everything shop’ crusade, it is slowly but certainly becoming the boss of the self-employed in retail. I’ll have to recruit more members to the Random Book Club so that I can break free from the increasingly constraining shackles of Amazon. Performance ratings are based on several factors, including order defect rate, cancellation rate, late dispatch rate, policy violations and contact response time. These are not the easiest of metrics to follow, so I tend to ignore it until they email me to tell me that I am in trouble.

A family of four came in at 12.30 p.m. Each of them bought a book; each gave a different response to the question ‘Would you like a bag?’

Mother – ‘Oh, go on then.’

Father – ‘No.’

Son 1 – ‘Yes.’

Son 2 – ‘Only if you’ve got one.’

At 1 p.m. Carol Crawford appeared. I like to stock a few new books, probably around 150 titles that we buy from Booksource, a distributor of predominantly Scottish books. Carol is one of their sales reps. She is a charming woman, and we always chat about a variety of things before tackling the book business. Her son, who was just a small boy when she first started to come to the shop, is now at university. Until last year she would come armed with briefcases containing folders of book covers in plastic sheets, and order forms. Now she just has an iPad. She comes about four times a year, and deciding what to buy is a tricky business, particularly since customers no longer see the cover price of a new book as what they should be expected to pay. Amazon and Waterstones put paid to that, so once again I am in the position that – should I decide to – I could probably buy the stock I buy from Booksource cheaper on Amazon than I can from the distributor. I ordered two or three copies of about forty new titles on her list, mainly of local relevance, or written by people I know.

Back in 1899 the most powerful UK publishing houses agreed that they would only supply bookshops on the condition that the books were sold at the cover price and not discounted. Any breach of this, they agreed, would result in all of them ceasing to supply any books to the culprit. This was known as the Net Book Agreement (NBA). The system worked well for everyone until 1991, when chain stores Dillons and Waterstones emerged, dwarfing the small independents. They quickly realised that they could circumvent the NBA under a clause that exempted damaged books. Using a marker pen, they scored a cross onto the edges of the books they wished to discount. Occasionally I will still come across one of these when I am buying. Bitter fighting between the publishers and the big chains ensued, culminating in a ruling by the Office of Fair Trading that declared the NBA illegal in 1997.

One of the benefits of the NBA was that the financial stability of the market it created allowed publishers to publish books that perhaps had more cultural but probably less financial value. Without it, publishers are no longer in a position to take such risks, and consequently, although the number of books printed in the UK each year has increased, the number of titles has diminished: more copies of fewer books. The book market is now controlled not by publishers but by the buyers for Waterstones and Tesco and other ‘combines’, as Orwell would have called them.

Smell of cat piss is getting stronger.

Till total £111.50

12 customers