The Bookseller.com

29th August 2008

Philip Jones is the managing editor of theBookseller.com. He will blog with links and comment about the book business.

Blogging LBF - Day One

14.04.08

Maybe it's because I didn't go last year, when the London Book Fair returned to West London, but Earls Court seemed incredibly busy for a Monday morning. By 10am the coffee queues were already off-putting (at least for me), though the opening of the second hall (Earls Court Two) helped ease congestion.

It wasn't just the vendors that were busy, however, the aisles were bustling and many of the stands looked busy, and the seminars were packed.

The big hitters were in attendance: within moments of arriving I'd seen Richard Charkin, Anthony Forbes-Watson (making friends with one of his charges at Macmillan), uber booksellers Ted Smart and Seni Glaister, John Bond and Society of Authors chair Tracy Chevalier.

Chevalier said that she enjoyed keeping up with the business side of writing, but was in two minds about the fair, suggesting that there were too many suits when compared with the number of authors in attendance.

There was standing room only at the seminar I attended: Why Bookshops Must go Digital. This was surprising as the content was basically culled from last year's BA Report: Embracing the Digital Age.

Still, one can't hear enough how important it is that booksellers should set up their own transactional websites. As Michael Holdsworth, one speaker and co-author of the BA Report, re-iterated: "I don't think there's a choice here, the market for this content is moving to the internet, you've either got to move with it or sell something else." This very handily set up the second speaker Bob Jackson, commercial director at Gardners Books, who was able to plug his firm's easyentertainment.co.uk: a cheap--£25 a pop--way for a bookshop to set up a web presence with the full use of Gardners' physical and digital catalogues.

Personally, I've always been unconvinced by the identi-kit solution to web-retailing and Gardners revamp of something that has already been tried didn't do much to change my opinion. I was more convinced by the third-speaker Christopher Foyle's advice that a shop's web presence should be as unique—and special—as the physical store: "Each visit to one should stimulate a visit to the other."

Visit the easyentertainment.co.uk website and try to be inspired. Perhaps most telling was when a member of the audience asked the panel to name a UK independent bookseller that was doing a good job online: Powells, a US based bookseller was named, by Jackson.

Intriguingly Vivienne Wordley, recently made redundant at Foyles as commercial director, was in attendance, perhaps keeping an eye on her old boss Christopher Foyle, who had taken her place as one of the speakers.

Foyle's speech had been junked by the retailer's mail-server, and, despite promises, the presentations have yet to make it onto the London Book Fair's website: meaning, that despite the imperatives of digitisation, technology really shouldn't be trusted, and you still do really have to be there.

One last thing worth noting is that I managed to sneak into the fair without registering and without a name badge--the first time ever. It was really quite easy, and I wasn't even trying.

You can read the first The Bookseller Daily here, or view more LBF coverage here.

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