I fear new plan to save our book shops is not enough

SCOTLAND’S largest book shop is owned by a charmingly grumpy man called Shaun Bythell and when I was speaking to him recently, I asked him how things were going and how hopeful he was about the future of his shop, and his answer was suitably literary. He was, he said, “in blood stepped in so far, returning were as tedious as go o’er”. Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4.

To put it more prosaically: it’s bad, really bad, and the most pressing problem, obviously, is coronavirus. When Shaun’s shop in Wigtown was forcibly closed earlier this year, suddenly he was making no money at all, and then, even when he reopened, a lot of his elderly customers were staying at home so things didn’t get much better. With each passing day, Shaun told me, he was finding it harder to see a way out of it all.

But even before lockdown, Shaun, and pretty much every other independent bookseller, was worried about another great threat. He deals with it in the shop every day: customers who browse but shop elsewhere. Shaun remembers one particular man who was looking at a book about distilleries when the man’s friend leaned over and whispered, “it’s cheaper on Amazon”. I asked Shaun what he thought about Amazon and his answer was not quite so literary this time: b*****ds.

The problem, as far as Shaun is concerned, is Amazon has pretty much made every book available instantly, which drives down prices and makes it hard for shops such as Shaun’s to compete. At the same time, bookshops rely on Amazon for some of their income, minus Amazon’s cut. If Shaun made £16,000 a year from Amazon sales, for example, the website would take around £4,500. Eventually, Shaun gave up on Amazon altogether.

But is there hope? This week a new website launched. It’s called Bookshop.org and it aims to challenge Amazon by selling books directly from independent traders and giving them 30% of the cover price. Around 150 UK shops have already signed up and hope is high. Georgia

Eckert, a bookseller in Harrogate, said Bookshop.org’s reach could rival some of the big online competitors in a way bookshops couldn’t do individually. I hope so.

But, much as I love bookshops, and much as I buy from them whenever I can, I fear Bookshop.org will not be enough, for a simple reason: price. I took a look today at Bookshop.org and Amazon and compared the prices on some of the books I’ve bought recently. The biography was £3 cheaper on Amazon. The novel also £3 cheaper. The children’s book £2.50 cheaper.

That is the problem. Most book-lovers prefer the experience of browsing in a shop like Shaun’s – it’s how you come across books you didn’t know existed, and there’s nothing quite as wonderful as the serendipitous book. But in other ways, because they’re human, most book-lovers are also a bit like that man who whispered “it’s cheaper on Amazon”. Why would we spend more?

Sadly, grudgingly, it’s for that reason that the book market will continue to be dominated by the big guy. The problem with Amazon is that it doesn’t conform to the traditional idea of a monopoly – it has forced prices down rather than up – and for that reason I will probably continue to buy most of my books from Amazon, although I obviously don’t speak for all book-lovers: Bookshop.org made sales of £65,000 on Monday, its first day of trading. The US version of the site is expecting that this year its sales will be $50million.

All of that is good, and Bookshop.org will take a decent bite out of Amazon. It’s also worth remembering that behemoths like Amazon do not last forever, even online. This week Marks and Spencer reported the first loss in its history. Marks and Spencer! What kind of a business world are we in if Markies isn’t making money?

But the death of Amazon, like the death of the sun, won’t be in our lifetimes. Shaun Bythell is also pretty pessimistic about it all. He can’t see the situation changing. Amazon has a stranglehold, he says, and what’s more, changing the fortunes of shops like his would require government intervention and most governments, he says, are too s***-scared to do anything (I’m not sure if that’s a quote from Macbeth).

And in the end, shops like Shaun’s, and websites like Amazon and Bookshop.org, are all subject to the way humans behave. Many of us are afraid of the virus and are staying at home. Many of us are shopping more online. Many of us are reading more than we did before lockdown. But most of us don’t want to spend more money than we need to. Sad. But True.

What kind of a business world are we in if even Marks and Spencer isn’t making money?