I’m visiting Doncaster, where I drop in to the library in Bawtry to do some work and, out of habit, become a member. Bawtry is a community library, and the volunteer who processes my application is keen to show what it has to offer. On our way round, she points out a small room near the desk, which she tells me is “our bookshop”, where paperbacks, all in good condition, cost £1, and hardbacks £2. I scan its shelves and notice good clean copies of Kate Atkinson, Kate Mosse and David Attenborough titles. Does nobody want to borrow books like these anymore? What was the criterion for taking them off the shelves? I pick out the RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening, a book I know I would make good use of. It is a weighty slab that retailed for £35, and is mine for £2. Too good to miss, although it does feel a great shame to be taking a book out of the library where it belongs. But libraries, not just this library, are engaged in a big clear-out.
Later, curious to know if the library is underselling its stock, I check the price on Amazon, where I find copies of this edition of the RHS Encyclopedia available for £0.01p (plus P&P). What is going on?
The answer is an unattractive phenomenon that might be called peak book. Here’s how it is: when I started work at the Stevens & Brown library agency in 1974, there were around 30,000 new titles published annually in the UK. Forty years later, that figure had rocketed to 184,000, making the UK the third largest publishing country in the world, after China (440,000) and the USA (305,000). This is an ongoing trend, the Publishers Association reporting record figures in 2016, with sales of books and journals up 7% on the previous year to £4.8bn, their highest ever level.
This may be good news for the book industry, but is it good news for the book? You do not have to look far to start suspecting that there are too many books, and way too many books that do not count. On Amazon, for example, it is not just the RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening but a whole raft of titles that sell for £0.01p. The 1p coin as a denomination no longer registers, may soon be abolished, its only currency on the high street as change in 99p shops. And yet it can be used to buy, as I have bought, perfectly good and desirable books in good condition. Recently, this same price on Amazon bought me a book retailing at £14.99 whose labels show that it was purchased by St Helens Libraries, borrowed once, and withdrawn a year later. Similarly, second-hand bookshops often put a bargain bin outside, of books for 20p, or 10p, or free, books that have fallen through the bottom of the market. They survive thanks to the sentiment of bookshop owners who cannot bring themselves to burn, shred or recycle unloved and worn out old books.
But in the more commercial market, getting rid of unwanted books is big business. A report in 2009 found that 61 million books were returned to publishers from booksellers in the UK in the previous year. Their fate was to be shredded, pulped or sold on market stalls at a fraction of their original price. Blame was laid in part on over-optimistic ordering by bookshops, encouraged by a system that allows retailers to return unsold books. But there is also the problem that publishers simply cannot learn to predict the fickle taste of the reading public, and risk large sums on advances and production costs, always with one eye for a potential bestseller. I can only admire those who manage it: as I learnt in the electrostatic-charged aisles of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the algorithm of publishing, the one that balances integrity of concept and quality of production against the market forces of viability, print run, cost price and selling price, was one that takes a very special talent to get one’s head round. It can help an author to have a TV face, of course, although — surprisingly — celebrity works are some of the lowest sellers, as are some big-name literary novels. In a jaw-dropping statistic, Nielsen Bookscan found that of 86,000 new titles published in the UK in 2009, 59,000 sold an average of 18 copies each.
There are plenty of good books out there, but we cannot afford to take them for granted. In the retail sector, we have a dual economy: the supportive social economy of quality publishers and quality bookshops, and the faux black market spiv economy exemplified by Amazon, that squeezes its suppliers, undercuts its rivals, delivers on price and cares nothing for value or sustainability. This leaves authors, publishers and booksellers vulnerable. We can do something about this, by politicising our actions, by choosing which of the two economies gets our money.
As for libraries, the result of the last general election made a bad situation worse. Boris Johnson has said “I want to invest in libraries but we can only do that when we get the economy motoring,” missing the point that libraries are a contributor to conditions for an economic upturn, not a drain. Without the funds to maintain stocks of pertinent books, libraries will begin to fail. Clearing the shelves of good books that are not much borrowed is not a responsible action. And we have to continue to remind our councils and our politicians that what is needed is not only adequate funding, but procurement and stock control in the expert hands of librarians, not auditors, or volunteers.
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This is extracted from An English Library Journey, a new title due out in May 2022. Further details to be announced on this website.