November 29th, 2009 by Peter
It’s a real shame this week to see that the Borders chain in the UK has went into administration. I don’t know any book lovers who don’t also enjoy going to Borders but the problem, I think, was summed up very well in this article on the first post website.
“It might have worked had Borders UK stuck to the high street. Instead they made the fatal decision of settling in edge-of-town shopping malls where mums pushing babies might like to shop for food and clothes but educated singles and young couples don’t want to spend the afternoon flicking through books.
I really enjoy going to Borders for books but how exactly am I to get there when they’re stuck out on retail parks? Even by public transport these places are hard to get too, at least the local ones are, and who wants to pay for a combination of buses, metros and ferries when you can simply get on one metro into the city. You won’t have a borders but you can probably get by with Waterstone’s and in turn you have all the other shops, galleries, coffee shops and everything else the city offers. In general retail parks aren’t really places to hang out, besides borders it’s all big shops to buy fridges or discount clothing outlets.
It’s common sense when a large portion of book buyers are students or young people to have branches easily accessible to universitys and yet neither Newcastle, Sunderland (Okay, that one is understandable, they may be my alma mater but it’s still Sunderland.) or Durham has a branch. When I have been in city branches in places like Glasgow and Leeds they’re usually very busy and students often use the coffee shops to work in so not putting outlets near universities was a major error. I do buy some books online but I also buy a lot in the shops still, Borders always had better choice than any other chain in the UK in that sense. Waterstone’s is a good shop but is increasingly skewed towards best-sellers and celeb biogs, Foyles is great but only in London and WHSmith isn’t really a book shop – it’s bric-a-brac with a few books thrown in for effect.
I really wish that some other chain would see this for what it is – an opportunity – and move in on the market. It would be a perfect opportunity for someone like Barnes & Noble, who are surely long overdue a presence in the UK, to enter the market. Yes, they’d have to be on the ball and move into the big cities instead of staying on the margins but I do think the business model for big book shops can work if done correctly. It seems sad that in most of the areas in the UK you will now be left with the choice of only Waterstone’s or the internet. Borders didn’t just represent a shop, it was a place to socialise that stayed open decent hours. I’m not particularly a drinker so having somewhere you can sit with friends and good books on an evening was a perfect set up.
Tags: bookstores, Borders
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August 22nd, 2009 by Peter
It was Salman Rushdie who offered the opinion that The Da Vinci Code was ‘a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name’ but it still romped on to sell sixty million copies. Then again, more people than that voted for George W. Bush and look how that worked out.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably noticed that Dan Brown has a sequel coming out. There are subtle hints that have appeared around about that may have indicated this to you; the myriad of posters appearing like a bad dose of the pox around every bookstore, the pre-order offers emblazoned in adverts in the press, the fact that every time you buy something people feel obliged to try and persuade you to pre-order The Lost Symbol at the same time. It is, in short, inescapable.
An industry that should have some degree of self-respect and dignity has flung it all aside in a desperate rush to prostrate itself at the feet of Mammon and sell as many units as possible. It does not matter whether or not The Lost Symbol is good, bad or indifferent; what matters to them is that it will make them all lots of money.
Now, I’m not naive. Businesses have to run and have to try to turn a profit, as such something you know will sell units must be promoted. The promotion for The Lost Symbol, however, is all just too much. It’s everywhere and whether you like it or not if you wish to go to a bookstore you can’t escape it. It’s been this way since April – an unprecedented amount of time to be promotion a forthcoming book for. It’s not based on any merit but solely on the fact that dollar signs have appeared in the eyes of the store owners.
Part of the wonder of bookshops is that there are so many titles, such a great variety that you can go in and look through and choose from. Yes, some titles will be promoted but usually not to the extent that visitors to the store can’t escape them. Most readers don’t read because everyone else is doing it. They read because they choose to for their own enjoyment. Reading is different from other forms of entertainment, in a culture dominated by instant gratification books take a little time, you have to make a concious choice to take time out and read.
There is something wonderfully democratic about the fact that there is such a huge variety of books and most of them get the same amount of space in a bookstore – the width of their spine. Can it really be that we’ve reached the stage where bookshops are now just another place for marketing and promotion – placement over product, style over substance? Perhaps it makes me a hopeless old romantic but I tend to think that bookshops should be different; they should be in some way less commercial than other shops, more about the love of books than shamelessly shifting anything they can on their customers. This September instead of seeing The Lost Symbol I’d really like to see bookshops get back their Lost Dignity.
Tags: bookstores
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