Left on the Shelf

Is this just another example of an independent bookseller finding it impossible to survive amid the deep-discounting of the online bookstores or increasing retail dominance of the supermarkets who focus on a selection of best-sellers? Actually the answer is no.

The local bookstore Alden and Blackwell was part of a much bigger organisation - Blackwell - which has just undergone a revamp and now bills itself as the ‘knowledge retailer’. Blackwell has nearly sixty shops across the UK, many of them are university bookstores or flagship shops in cities such as Oxford, Edinburgh and London.

The sad demise of my local bookshop came after it ran up losses for many years. I have heard that the store made a loss in every year since the turn of the decade.

On the surface my local town should be an ideal place for a bookstore to succeed. The vast majority of the local population are involved in academic life either as students or teachers. The summer months create the potential for a lucrative passing trade from thousands of tourists wandering up our high street. The bookstore was also responsible for delivering newspapers and magazines to the local community.

But the store failed to respond adequately to our changing buying habits. I spend thousands of pounds every year on books and magazines but I haven’t used a bookstore that is no more than 30 metres from where I live for more than two years. I have switched almost completely to buying books and DVDs from Amazon, Play.com and Borders. And for bulk orders, I go direct to the publishers to avoid the retail profit margin and get a deal closer to the wholesale price. Judging from the mountain of newly-bought books that bear an Amazon imprint in our school office, many of my colleagues have been doing exactly the same!

Had the bookstore reinvented itself to sell second hand books online, provide a welcoming coffee bar to entice local people (and save us a 1/2 mile walk to the nearest Costa) then the volume of customers browsing and buying might well have improved. But this was a bookstore stuck in a time warp with little drive or ambition.

So its demise is sad, but it opens a door for a more enlightened and entrepreneurial business to take its place. Watch this space!