There is much gnashing of teeth in the trade press about the future of independent bookselling. Indeed, whenever I write anything about sales of books in the UK I get a lot of comments and correspondence attacking us (and other publishers) for undermining independent booksellers by granting too high discounts to chains, supermarkets and Amazon. The Bookseller magazine has carried many excellent articles on the subject but I think this angry and forthright letter published by them yesterday deserves to be widely debated and I've appended a few paragraphs from it. I don't agree with Mr Foster's conclusions (nor his views on the Booksellers Association)  but I do think we need to address the issue more formally than through the Bookseller or this blog:

Independents are the key

I refer to Jonathan Spencer-Payne's recent letter (The Bookseller, 1st December) in which he forecast that there would be no independent bookshops in 20 years. While I agree with most of what he says, I do think he's being rather optimistic. I know of three which have closed relatively recently and two that are in difficulty in our region...

...The independents are the seedbeds of the business and the custodians of our literary culture. They subsidise the discounts given so generously by the publishers to the chains, supermarkets and internet booksellers. They are the de facto agents (unpaid) for Book Tokens, which are hidden by the chains (which prefer to sell their own vouchers), and they keep the wholesalers in business.

They are run in the main by sensible people who do not owe the banks hundreds of millions of dollars. They support a comatose and ineffectual trade organisation whose chief executive is never heard or seen promoting bookshops in the media.

When the independents go, the lot goes, and it'll be sooner than you think. The chains will never, ever be able to compete with the supermarkets and the internet. Happy New Year.

Philip Foster
Owner, The Tolsey Bookshop & Stationers
Tetbury, Glos GL8 8JG