Boyd Tonkin: Crimes behind closed doors

The week in books - The Independent - Friday, 9 September 2011

Sometimes, even a soppy Richard Curtis rom-com can serve a social purpose. Of all the closures of independent stores that have left hundreds of British high streets a book-free wilderness, none has given rise to more celebrity keening than the imminent demise of The Travel Bookshop. The west London specialist outlet was famously rebuilt as the set for Hugh Grant's nervous romance with Julia Roberts in Notting Hill. Now, its looming departure has become a symbol of the town-by-town, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood extinction of non-chain or non-supermarket book retailers.

New research from the data-collection giant Experian focuses the mind as sharply as Dr Johnson's sentence of death by hanging. The total of independent bookstores in Britain has more or less halved since 2005, from over 4,000 to 2,178. According to Experian, 580 towns have no bookshop at all.

In a fine piece of analysis for the trade bible The Bookseller, The Travel Bookshop's owner Simon Gaul identifies each element in the "perfect storm" that has wrecked his sector. They include the suicidal abandonment in the 1990s of the price-maintaining Net Book Agreement; the shifts in planning law that kowtowed to the demands of supermarkets and other out-of-town warehouse managers at the expense of high streets; and of – course – the boom in online retail.

I would only add the extraordinary self-destructive impasse into which the British book trade has backed itself. This encapsulates a far wider failure of political vision and will. Unlike countries in Continental Europe, the UK will not protect bookshops as a special class of cultural asset whose value justifies intervention in the market for rents, leases and so forth. Unlike the US, neither will it give competition rules the teeth to make a "free market" more than an empty slogan. Instead, we prefer to privilege corporate heavyweights by permitting them an eye-watering range of special favours, from interference in planning decisions to access to unfair discounts.

This last sweetener to monopoly retail remains a howling scandal. In Roosevelt's New Deal America, the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 outlawed the sort of price discrimination that saw chain stores receive a better deal from producers than independent outfits. Without any such legislation here, that same injustice has blighted British bookselling. Farcically, the independents slope off to the supermarket – or Amazon - to buy their stock at knock-down prices that they could never command from publishers. Meanwhile, we endure such fixes as the cosy arrangement that allowed WH Smith travel bookshops to source their guidebook brands (Rough Guides, Dorling Kindersley) from a single publishing group: Penguin. In Britain's corporate state, the "Office of Fair Trading" runs instead as a Bureau for the Whitewashing of Monopolies.

As in any suspenseful novel, deeper layers of plot lurk behind the massacre of bookshops. It occupies a chapter in several other stories: the high street's long decline; the spread of semi-rural "exurbia"; the haemorrhage of resources from traditional towns and cities; the near-takeover of politics and planning by corporate lobbies; and the intersection of new leisure technologies with a culture of solitary consumption.

As a result, we can't seriously hope to fix the symptom without addressing the causes. And that task lies some way beyond the pay grade of Mary Portas, the TV-friendly "queen of shops" signed up by government to enquire into the high street's woes. All the same, in the absence of anyone empowered to draw the big picture, a bit more unboxed thinking about the place of books in civic renewal would help. My own crazy idea of the week would yoke local bookshops and branch libraries together in a joint stand against their various crises of survival.

Why not place indie bookshops within, or next to, libraries? Since both locations now enhance their offer to users – from music and stationery to coffee for the former, or the latter's strength in online information – the conflict of interest might not be as glaring as it first appears. In areas of dearth, "reading hubs" that twin-tracked public service and private purchase might flourish more than rival sites.

Together, both could more effectively serve the audience for live events whose growth – via the festival circuit – has lifted literary spirits in harsh times. A mad wheeze, maybe. But just look at where the sane ones have led. 

Full piece at The Independent.