Quintin Jardine's blog

That’s the way book retailing is these days. It’s where you have to be if you want to be noticed by new readers. That works to the advantage of the existing fan base as well, so everybody should be happy. Unfortunately the big black cloud hanging over this is the contraction in the number of book stores after years of expansion. Go back thirty years and in Edinburgh you’d find James Thin and John Menzies, a newsagent that sold books. Go back ten years and you’d find the same two, although Menzies had become W H smith by then, plus Ottakars, Waterstone and Borders. Go there now and you’ll find Waterstone and WHS.

What’s happened?  Well, Amazon has, for a start, but everyone sells on-line these days, including me. There’s no doubt that has impacted on the High Street. That wasn’t foreseen in the years of expansion, but neither was the voraciousness of supermarkets, their expansion into areas that are miles away from their core business and their practice of listing only the top-selling titles, often at loss leader prices. It could be argued that every time a book is sold in Tesco  it’s another nail in the coffin of the traditional book trade.