From the Archive: Bookshops
From the Archive’ is the regular column that revisits some of the more interesting retail stories covered over the past 30 years by Glynn Davis for a variety of publications.
This period covers many seismic structural changes in the industry including the emergence of the internet. Alongside the actual stories Glynn will be adding commentary around each of the pieces that will seek to put the articles into context with today’s landscape.
Subscribe to TRBFrom Retail Week ‘Technology Report’ (16 May 1997)
Back in the 1990s it was a revolutionary period for book selling. In the middle of that decade the mighty Amazon was founded and underwent an IPO in May 1997 at which time my article taking a look at the future of physical bookshops was published.
The consensus among the companies around at the time including Waterstone’s, Blackwell’s, Dillon’s and Books etc. was that online bookselling would be very much complementary to physical bookshops. To ensure they had a seat at the online table Blackwell’s first launched its online store in 1997 and Waterstone’s opened its internet store in November 1996.
There was also a number of independents crop up who were very early players in the online space. In 1994 Darryl Mattocks using personal funding and a loan from the Blackwell family to found Bookshop.co.uk whose name was changed in April 1996 to The Internet Bookshop. In 1998 the company was sold for £9.4 million to WH Smith who went on to fold it into its main website.
At exactly the same time Bookpages – a copycat to The Internet Bookshop – was sold to Amazon who used it as its beachhead from which to launch its operations across Europe. As part of this strategy the Bookpages site was immediately subsumed into the US parent’s business.
During this late-1990s period physical bookshops fared well as highlighted by the comments of Roger Katz, general manager at Hatchards, who suggested: “The traditional, specialist bookshop is enjoying an upturn in popularity and the main reason is service.”
Even Mattocks was suggesting there was “no substitute for flicking through [physical] books, and you can’t smell books on our website”. And he added: “We are not going to put conventional bookshops out of business.”
There is no doubt that the service given by high street bookshops was vastly superior to that found online – especially as many outlets were starting to introduce lounges and cafés – but what online brought to the party was the incredibly powerful weapon of cheap prices. So while the bookshop industry saw online as complementary Amazon had other ideas as it fought the battle through massive discounts and the introduction of the Kindle e-reader.
This ended up causing serious great grief to the sector. The all-time low point for independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland was 2016 when there were less than 870 stores. However, Amazon and the other players could only go so far and after the nadir in the industry there has been a gradual resurgence.
This year the number of independent bookshops has grown to almost 1,100, which has largely been driven by genre-focused curation and community-led models. The local, independent bookstore is back. Leading the charge is James Daunt, CEO of Waterstones, which has over 300 UK bookshops and owns the Foyles, Hatchards and Blackwell’s names as well as the US’s largest bookstore chain Barnes & Noble.
“People have come back to reading and buying books in bookshops as we have made a place which is an enjoyable and effective way to buy books,” he says, adding that growth is even stronger in the US because the demise of bookshops there “has been more savage”. Evidence of the buoyant market is the Barnes & Noble plan to open 60 new stores each year.
My article was absolutely correct in its conclusion that people would shop at online bookstores in increasing numbers (hardly an outlandish prediction I’d suggest!) but this has ultimately not been at the total expense of the physical bookstore.
