As ebooks boom and publishers brace themselves for an 'iPod moment', bestsellers such as Blair's continue to endure
Robert McCrum The Observer, Sunday 5 September 2010
At the beginning of A Journey, Tony Blair brags that he has "the soul of a rebel". Last week, he made good on that boast by conducting a gravity-defying act of literary presumption – publishing a hardback of some 720 pages, priced at £25, tricked out with index, acknowledgments and 32 pages of photographic plates. More transgressive yet, the rebellious former PM confessed that he had handwritten it himself, with a pen, on "hundreds of notepads". Even more incredible, in the current climate, the punters have shown every sign of responding to this quixotic act of defiance.
According to Cathy Rentzenbrink, manager of the Richmond Waterstone's: "These sales are brilliant and really exciting. You don't often have customers almost breaking down the door to buy a book, but Blair is totally outselling Mandelson. I've not seen anything this big since Harry Potter or Dan Brown. This looks like the Christmas book of the year." She adds: "It's very rare for a hardback to outsell a future paperback, but this might be one of those exceptions." Rentzenbrink says she does not know its Amazon discount, or if there's a significant ebook and audiobook sale. (Those figures are closely guarded.) What matters is that a fat hardback with a big print run is actually selling.
Go into any bookshop today and you will find the unmistakable evidence of a business in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown: hardbacks discounted at 50% (Waterstone's is selling Blair for £12.50); heaped tables of "3 for 2"; and spectral hints of the death of print: audiobooks and advertisements for the Sony Reader (another new version launched this week), or the Elonex touch screen, or the Cybook Opus. In 2010, there are more than 20 competing e-readers.
Across the Atlantic, Blair's chunky memoir will seem even more antique. The American reading public are adopting the ebook with the enthusiasm of a great consumer society. Wherever you go in the US, the electronic print of the hand-held screen glows like fairytale magic. Ebook sales are soaring, accompanied by dire predictions about the future of publishing. The picture is all the more disturbing because it's so hard to interpret, with competing diagnoses. Are we in intensive care or the morgue ?
Waterstone's, like New Labour, is emblematic of a changing Britain. Founded in 1982, most of its innovations took place under Thatcher. Its prospects were transformed by the collapse of retail price control (the Net Book Agreement) in 1994. By 1997 it had seen off the competition (WH Smith, Dillons etc) and would lead the British book world into a period of unprecedented growth.
The figures tell the story. In 1997, the year of the New Labour landslide, the gross domestic consumption of books in Britain amounted to £1.914bn. By 2000 it was £2.242bn. In 2007, the year Blair left No 10, it peaked at £3.602bn. The total number of new titles had risen from about 100,000 (1990) to pushing 200,000 (2009). Subsequently, in the recession, sales are down, but the real story is of a prolonged assault on the infrastructure of a time-hallowed trade.
Since 2000, the Anglo-American book business has been rocked by seismic convulsions. Google has digitised some 10 million titles. Barnes and Noble is for sale. Borders, bankrupt in the UK, clings on in the US. Here, Waterstone's parent company, HMV, wants to sell. Amazon's market share continues to soar. Asda, Tesco and the supermarket chains are said to be draining the life out of independent bookselling. In the US, it's claimed that ebooks are now outselling many hardbacks. By the end of 2010, 10.3 million Americans are expected to own e-readers, buying an estimated 100m ebooks (up from 3.7m e-readers and 30m ebook sales in 2009).
The full McCrum piece can be read at The Guardian online.
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