Sainsbury's: your new local bookshop?

According to The Bookseller magazine, Sainsbury's is the UK's chain bookseller of the year, 'an alternative place to buy and browse'. Maybe - if you're only in the market for books about Michael MacIntyre and Madeleine McCann

Ball and chain ... a Sainsbury's store in Barnstaple, north Devon. Photograph: Alamy

Do you know which bookseller is the best in the country? 

According to industry bible the Bookseller, it's Sainsbury's. It gave the supermarket a gong (with the marvellous title of the "Martina Cole general or chain bookselling company of the year award") for "reinvigorating book zones, increasing book sales by more than 33% and attracting new book buyers to the market". In the Bookseller write-up, one judge was quoted as saying: "We should celebrate the fact that they are embracing books and offering people an alternative place to buy – somewhere they can spend time browsing as well as buying."

Browsing? In Sainsbury's? I decided to check it out. Yesterday I cycled along to my local branch and had a good look over the literature on offer. I wouldn't dignify that activity with the word browsing, however: it took me more time to find the book section (tucked away next to shelves filled with WD-40) than it did to decide I didn't want to buy anything it was selling. There were a handful of recipe books, a top 40 chart (select titles: Kate Morton, The Distant Hours; Mary Burton, Dying Scream; Felix Riley, The Set Up; Michael McIntyre, Live and Laughing) and a small section dedicated to a book about Madeleine McCann. If pushed, I could have walked away with The Fry Chronicles; otherwise there was nothing I even wanted to pick up. And I looked at every book. I even counted them: 88 different titles. That's more than Heinz's 57 varieties. But fewer than the different types of cheese available in the same shop.

Most depressingly of all, the children's section was limited to one small row at ground level. It looked about as thrilling as – well – a supermarket shelf. Selling children's books should be about selling excitement and wonder. The bookshops of my childhood were beautifully decorated gateways to mystery and adventure. It's sad to think that my daughter's generation may have no more attachment to choosing their next read than to choosing a tin of beans, and that books will be lumped in with the general boredom of cleaning products, potatoes and checkouts.

So much for "celebrating" browsing. Perhaps I'm romanticising too much. It's easy to be snotty about the books in Sainsbury's, and to complain about their lack of range. The chain could reasonably argue that it gives people what they want and does it well. If people wish to read about Michael McIntyre, that's entirely their choice. If it annoys sanctimonious media types like me, so much the better.

Genuinely troubling, though – and a matter of hard fact rather than emotion – is that the way supermarkets sell books is damaging to most of the publishing industry. Nearly all the books on offer in Sainsbury's, for instance, were priced at two for £7. That's less than the price of a ready meal for each book. Once you've factored in the costs of editing, proofreading, typesetting and production, how much does that leave the author per copy? Not much. How much profit does the publisher make? Not much. How much could a small specialist press hope to make at those prices? A colossal loss. Only a very few books can hope to become economically viable.

Full story by Sam Jordison at The Guardian.