Publishing’s flawed equation

This week The Bookseller crowned a new “golden age of bookselling”, as we announced the country and regional winners of the Independent Bookshop Award, run as part of the British Book Awards. We don’t use the term lightly. Of course, in a sense you cannot have too many “golden ages”, but nevertheless, even the book trade must occasionally step off the hype-train. So on this occasion, we mean it.

Bookshops are helped by the product(s) they sell, but they are so often the light-givers and celebrants for the work writers and publishers put, sometimes hesitantly, into the world

It is not as though this is the first time we’ve reported on the general revivification of high-street bookshops, whether through the prism of Waterstones’ growing confidence or the incredible work, as in this case, done by the increasing number of independent booksellers that now operate successfully across these islands and nations.

As my colleague and fellow judge Tom Tivnan reports, “although there are different models [in play], from longtime family-run shops to a community-run not-for-profit, the common thread is constant innovation and unwavering support for local communities... The past 10 or 15 years have been the most testing of times for indies as they have battled against online competition, supermarket deep discounting, rising business rates and, of course recently, a global pandemic.”

Bookshops are helped by the product(s) they sell, but they are so often the light-givers and celebrants for the work writers and publishers put, sometimes hesitantly, into the world. In terms of a creative industry, one managing an over-abundance of product, few sectors do it better or with such equanimity.

Of course, there’s a rub. In its own way the Small Press award represented something of a flip-side this year; while publishing is also enjoying a gilded period in terms of demand for the product, with costs escalating, the impacts of Brexit still playing through and the high discounts demanded by supermarkets, Amazon and the chains, theirs is a situation becoming more, not less, hazardous. As this week’s Lead Story makes clear, the results may be a constraint on print—“fewer pages in books”—a reduction in quality of the package, or delays around key titles. Books buyers may have to get “used to paying a little extra for them”, says Bridget Shine, c.e.o. of the Independent Publishers Guild.

And yet, when I speak to heads of houses, the issue of r.r.p. rarely comes up. On this subject, the trade associations, aside from the IPG in this instance, are quiet. If we are preparing ourselves to make public an argument around book prices that we ought to have had 25 years ago, we are doing a pretty poor job. According to Nielsen data, the average r.r.p. in 2021 was £11.56, the second-highest of all time; and while it is true that paperbacks have nudged up to £8.99, the biggest jump in r.r.p. year on year was actually between 2009 and 2010, and that was a mere 32p.

But the crucial question is really the obvious one: are customers paying more? The answer is no. The actual selling price has fallen. Less, in fact, than in both 2020 and 2019. This, my friends, is an equation that will not resolve itself.