Potter party eludes small booksellers
Posted: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 11:36 AM
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London, England
By Michelle Kosinski, NBC News Correspondent
Now that (most) of the mayhem has died down surrounding the release of the latest and last Harry Potter book, neighborhood booksellers in London are able to rub their eyes and survey the aftermath.
No, not shelves picked clean and lines outside shouting demands for ever-more book orders. Not at all. Time to assess their losses.
At least, that's what they fully expect.
How is that possible?? How could the unprecedented worldwide mania that IS Harry Potter, bring anything but enormous profits to anyone in the book business? Like a gift from heaven to the bookseller's door -- or so one would think.
The answer is competition. Leaving independent booksellers shaking their heads and feeling kicked to the curb in all this excitement.
Priced out by bigger stores
"It makes you feel a little bitter and a bit cynical about the whole business of the way modern bookselling is going," said Kirsty Anderson, a children's book seller in Mayfair, a posh London neighborhood. Her store is the kind of magical place where a kid could curl up with a book in an old, but colorful corner, and never want to leave. Neither would an adult, for that matter.
But the enormous appetite for all things Harry has made this all an eye-opening, and rather sad, experience for many of the mom-and-pop type bookshops that make London even more wonderful than it already is.
Here's how it all went down: the publisher of the book decided that the recommended retail price for Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows in the U.K. should be about $36.
Big box retailers decided that to bring in the hungry hordes, they would buy up huge quantities, and sell them below retail...then, below wholesale...and by the day before the release, below the price of a modest sandwich. One grocery store offered the 600-page hardbound book for $10.
For once, a boon for the consumer. Or was it?
Smaller bookshops, like the one owned by Michael Gibbs, just could not compete.
"What am I supposed to do? Go down to my local grocery store with a wheelbarrow and buy a bunch of those books to put on my shelves?" Many booksellers did just that! Just so they could turn any profit at all. But Gibbs decided it was not worth it.
He set his selling price at around $24 -- still well below the recommended price.
From which he would make a profit of around $2 per book. Yep, that's it. And even at that, his price was still $14 higher than at the big retail store down the road.
Where Gibbs in the past would order hundreds of copies of the latest Potter blockbuster... This year? He ordered eighty. Not worth it, he said, to try to make any windfall... off the FASTEST-SELLING BOOK OF ALL-TIME.
Feeling a tad let down
So, you can see why so many were shaking their heads. Many lament the decline of the corner bookstore in this old city, as well the tougher and tougher time they have competing in the world of huge stores with bigger stockpiles of discounted stock.
Some even feel that this sort of supercharged competition, over a book, downgrades the value of the book itself. "A book is not a can of beans," they were saying. Not something to treat like anything other than a work of art. And it’s more than worth the price of the paper it’s printed on.
It smarted even more considering that it was the smaller shops that made Harry Potter famous. They had stocked it and recommended it to readers even when it had a slow start and the venerable J.K. Rowling was an unknown. She is now the first billionaire author, ever. They feel a tad... let down.
But, such is competition in the modern world, even in a place brimming over with old-world charm.
"It's sad that it's come to this sort of way," said Gibbs, "because there's room for everybody. Why do they have to...destroy it for us? Because we as booksellers, we make a reasonable living. We don't make a great killing, and they are just removing one of those little props that provides us with a bit of fat."
In the end, some were sure they would, astonishingly, lose money on Harry Potter. But Gibbs has actually done a bit better than he originally thought. He had to order a couple dozen more books, and has sold more than a hundred now, on his quaint street in the Battersea neighborhood of London.
He thanks his loyal customers who, even in this day and age, would pay $14 more than they had to for a quiet place in their neighborhood, with sunbeams streaming through old windows, the smell of fresh paper, a friendly smile and the thrill of escaping modern life, for just a little while.
