A turbulent start of the year for Waterstone's

Peter Kilborn | 02/01/2010

The Christmas season, blighted by the slow and messy death of Borders UK, has produced another casualty: Gerry Johnson, Managing Director of Waterstone’s, has lost his job after presiding over an 8 percent drop in like-for-like sales over the festive period. Yes, this is a digital blog, but the long-predicted shake out on the high street is significant for a book trade which is seriously unsure of the direction it is heading.

Waterstone’s is part of the HMV Group, a music retailer. How many times have we heard that the music industry is a disaster zone and that publishers must avoid the mistakes the music industry made in order to survive? Yet HMV stores had a remarkably good Christmas, albeit bolstered by the acquisition of a number of the better stores from the failed Zavvi chain and by selling games. The group is now diversifying into cinemas and live music venues; and Waterstone’s has begun to look distinctly unglamorous by comparison.

Waterstone’s has made many mistakes – not least its changes of mind about its commitment to an online presence (moving to a branded Amazon site and then feebly attempting to challenge Amazon by taking it back again) – and there is optimism that there will be a radical change of direction under its new management. But it cannot afford to go on losing sales at current rates, whatever the underlying reasons, so we shall see…

As far as digital publishing is concerned, it has been an eerily quiet start to the year. There have been no published figures for UK sales of e-readers or book downloads and that may in itself be evidence that neither were up to the most optimistic expectations. There is no indication that the availability of Kindle in the UK has made a significant impact. Despite all the noise around new e-readers – every electronics company apparently determined to have one of its own – they are mostly copycat devices, and prices are not falling to a level where a mass market is emerging.

There is in any case no sense in which the UK is at the centre of technical developments for digital publishing and the publishing world’s eyes remain fixed on the major US players - especially Apple at the moment. It is strongly rumoured that UK publishers are negotiating content deals with Apple for its long-awaited tablet. Content is what the UK brings to the digital party: as one of the key centres of English-language – and therefore world – publishing the UK is an extremely important focus. But at the moment this often tends to mean licensing of content rather than either the dissemination or the consumption of it.

0 Commentaires

fils RSS