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Bring it on - The Bookseller

It is now more than two weeks since what should have been the London Book Fair did not happen and the book trade began its slow-motion close-down, with wholesalers Gardners and Bertrams this week following bookshops into suspended animation.

If March was dire, April may yet live up to its reputation as the cruellest month, as we all discover that without bookshops, libraries and festivals, this trade looks very different. A business just about, but not how we know it, or would like it to be.

As we reported earlier this week, Nielsen BookScan is no longer able to provide full-market data. As with LBF, these incredibly difficult times throw up intensely tricky decisions: that we have charts at all should be seen as a triumph. Yet the moment does mark a shift, a darkening of what we can see.

Without the numbers, it is impossible to know how much of the UK book sector is still functioning, with supermarket sales, online retail and (outside of Nielsen) digital sales perhaps—at best, and in good times—50% to 60% of most trade publishers’ business. Even if Gardners does reopen in some kind of form, it will do little to change the overall picture: that of haemorrhaging sales for most trade publishers, big and small. It is little wonder that one executive has already suggested “mothballing” the whole show until the summer.

But I wonder about that. If ever books were needed, it is now; if ever writers were necessary, it is today. It may be right that bookselling was not considered an essential service by the UK government, but it still sticks in the craw. As Waterstones m.d. James Daunt told Radio 4’s “Today” programme this week: “A lot of retailers can say they’re essential. I think we can say so with much more credibility than most.”

Publishing is not just about reading, of course. It is also about noise, the clamour of the new jostling up against and sometimes usurping the old. The mind does not stop just because we have been stilled physically. We do not yet know how it translates into actual sales, but the very many virtual launches, online festivals and video interviews are a necessary way of keeping on keeping on, even if it turns out just to be an echo of how it used to be.

We will now learn new ways of being, and some of these will prove useful for the longer-term. If we are smart, we will use the lockdown to rethink the bits of the business that were already faulty, and to look again at models (subscriptions, direct-to-consumer) that can be developed in the future, in tandem with a reinvigorated bookshop business.

There will be some who will use the opportunity to argue that the changes made today will last into tomorrow, that the cancellation, for example, of the Edinburgh International Book Festival this year means that its virtual reproduction is all we will have left of it. That, of course, is nonsense. We will have more ways to sell books as a result of this, not fewer.

In an email to fans this week, musician and writer Nick Cave (whose book Stranger Than Kindness was published last week by Canongate) referred to how he was using the pandemic to catalyse a creative response. “As an artist, it feels inapt to miss this extraordinary moment.” We can all learn a bit from this: eyes wide open, this is a reset, not an end.

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Bring it on - The Bookseller
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