The Bookseller.com

7th January 2009

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

Is the price wrong?

20.11.08

The Booksellers Association’s Benchmarking Study is a sobering reflection on the state of the British book industry. British bookshops are making less money, seeing less market growth, and giving away more in discounts than their counterparts overseas. UK bookshops make fewer profits per book than the Irish, the Americans, the Finns, the Swedes or the Dutch, the report concludes.

It is almost as if, more than 10 years after the demise of the Net Book Agreement, the BA is asking: “Where did it all go wrong?” As BA president Graham Rand says: “We have to ask ourselves whether the industry has gone too far in creating this ‘lowest price’ environment for consumers.”

The report does have some drawbacks: it is limited to just five countries, with perhaps more analogous markets such as France, Germany, Canada, and Australia not included. It is heavily weighted to the UK, with some 138 responses from booksellers here, compared with just 13 in Ireland, seven in the US, five in the Netherlands, and 14 in Sweden.

Nevertheless, the study is an important contribution to an ongoing debate about the state of British bookselling. It is likely to be welcomed particularly by the BA’s independent members—“Consumers are gaining at the expense of the independent bookseller” says one of the authors—even if it tells them what they already know. Most savvy indies have already given up trying to compete with the supermarkets and e-retailers on price: right now for instance, as our report on page six makes clear, they are anxiously awaiting a “Christmas” title they can claim for their own, as they have done in previous years.

The report will sit less well among the chains, the supermarkets, and internet booksellers, which have sought to gain the most through discounting.

The finding that price promotions have not “translated into high growth in volumes” looks to be at odds with the strategies employed by these companies. ­Amazon, alone, has grown a near $20bn (£13.2bn) business: it didn’t do it by selling books at full price.

Perhaps unintentionally, the report throws a spotlight on a schism that has widened between different book­selling sectors. It is to be hoped that this uncomfortable fact does not prevent the BA from leading the “informed debate” that it is now calling for.

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