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Bookselling
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Written by Frances Goldberg
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Sunday, 22 August 2010 01:18 |
 The Audiobook Store opened for business in the 1980s. Next week it celebrates its second anniversary in its large Baker Street premises. Frances Goldberg on a recipe for retailing success...
The Audiobook Store has been in Baker Street for almost two years now, having moved from Wigmore Street on 1 September 2008. And what an exciting and eventful time it’s been. We have found our feet and are happy to be on a main bus route and a busy street with plenty of footfall. The shop takes up two floors, ground and basement, and we have over 5,000 audiobooks in stock, with access to all audio published here and in the States.
Stanley Simmonds started the business, from a basement in Wigmore Street in the 1980s, and through knowing Stanley from synagogue, I became a spare pair of hands at Christmas time. Stanley has since retired and here I am! When I first started working with him, the business was primarily cassettes, changing slowly to CDs. Now we sell almost exclusively CDs, and children’s book and CD packs, but you’d be surprised by how many customers still ask for cassettes. They're so much easier to stop and start again at the same place.
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Bookselling
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Tuesday, 18 May 2010 09:51 |
 An edited version of the address by Sharon Murray, outgoing President of
the Booksellers Association, to the Book Industry Conference yesterday
afternoon (17 May)
This is our annual opportunity to come together as an industry, for publishers and booksellers to pause and reflect on what has happened in the last year and to decide what we are going to do about it.
As BA President, I have the privilege of opening the Conference by looking both backwards and forwards, reflecting on 2009 and making some predictions for 2010. So here are my lowlights and highlights and, I hope, some of my insights.
Straight to the big questions.
BIC, E4Books, Editeur, E4Libraries, ONIX, EDI, XML, DOI, ISTC, IRI – whose heart doesn’t beat faster when they’re mentioned? How can I start a speech like this? Well, that’s one of my insights.
Just because it’s boring doesn’t mean it’s not important.
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Bookselling
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Written by Simon-Peter Trimarco
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Monday, 15 March 2010 18:26 |
The Kilburn Bookshop is to close at the end of this month, with owner Steve Adams (who continues to run the Willesden Bookshop) citing a rent increase - after the lease had ended - and the disruptive effects of lengthy engineering works as factors exacerbating the trends that already make life tough for independents. Simon-Peter Trimarco, Manager, reflects both in sorrow and in anger on the state of the book trade
The Kilburn Bookshop is closing its doors for good on 31 March,
2010, after 30 years' service to the good folk of NW6.
I'm gradually de-stocking the shop, but it's vile working in a
not-very-good bookshop, and the shelves are starting to look pretty
ropey. I'm trying to put down my thoughts about where I see the
industry going, and realize that I think the whole industry is going to
fail in the next couple of years. Dillons, Ottakar's, Hammicks have all
gone; Borders went bankrupt in December; Waterstone's has obviously been
struggling for ages; most independents have closed, or will do soon; and those stalwarts and new
shops which (we are told) are "thriving" are situated in out-of-the-way
places and in very affluent neighbourhoods with no competition for the
mass market.
Soon there won't be enough shops for publishers to get a new title
stocked and sold - then they'll start failing too. We’ve had to suffer
the online folk like Amazon and the big chains and supermarkets
demanding huge discounts in order to discount themselves to oblivion. Idiot publishers have just rolled over saying “yes, take it all." Backlist titles are now coming in at silly money prices - £14.99 for a Penguin Classic anyone?
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Bookselling
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Written by Martin Lee
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Thursday, 28 January 2010 01:07 |
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It's all too easy to criticise Waterstone's, writes Martin Lee. The chain's real problem is that it grew too quickly and long ago outgrew its natural market share
When people are being critical of Waterstone’s past decade, there tends to be a familiar tone to the accusations. A few prompts and anyone can fill in the gaps for themselves: Lost its raison d’etre… Got rid of its influential booksellers or allowed them to leave… Sold out to the mid-market… De-skilled the branches through central buying… Lost its connection to passionate book-lovers… Became a corporate behemoth. And so on.
Hmmm. Maybe, but you could put up an alternative set of prompts that would be very defensible: Hundreds of bookshops with large breadth of stock-holding… Only committed bookselling chain still standing… Still offering a tactile browsing experience in the age of the internet. Take your pick.
To step back from this, it’s instructive to look at Waterstone’s narrative arc (to borrow from American screen writing jargon). The chain’s first eight years or so was its only pure phase, when all the stores were fresh-build Waterstone’s branches and growth was organic. Subsequently, it’s had three very big, instant boosts in its size and market share, following the merger with Sherratt & Hughes in the early Nineties, the takeover of Dillons later that decade and the takeover of Ottakar’s this decade. There have been other minor acquisitions along the way. |
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Bookselling
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Written by Andrew Hayward
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Thursday, 21 January 2010 09:54 |
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Waterstone’s is a great company with tremendous potential, writes Andrew Hayward. Here is what I would do
Dear Simon Fox and Dominic Myers,
I hope you’ll forgive my presumption in sharing my thoughts on the future of Waterstone’s. I know it is not my place to tell you how to run your company. I write this because: a) I have had a great business relationship with Waterstone’s for 20 years; b) I care passionately about Waterstone’s. Having spent the last 25 years with Penguin and Constable & Robinson, I think my comments are, at the least, worthy of consideration. A sign of my seriousness is that I have even given up my Saturday afternoon at the rugby to pen this missive.
First, Waterstone’s is a highly recognised brand in the high street: I do not know what the recognition factor is but I would reckon it to be about 70%, which is an impressive indicator of how far the chain has come since 1982. And Dominic will know how much greater it has always been than Ottakar’s, Books Etc, and indeed the recently deceased Borders. In my view the big problem of the last four or five years has been that Waterstone’s has allowed itself to be dragged into competing with the supermarkets, trying to reach the mass of C1s and C2s, with the result that all that you have done is to alienate the core Waterstone’s market. |
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