No blame from me on customers, sorry re-read my post and it does sound a little like that! As a retailer I’m just happy customers choose to buy books from me – and the reasons they do so are a mix of price, availability, promotion and sometimes personal recommendation (when I’m very lucky).

All I wanted to point out is that there aren’t ‘fat cat’ retailers running over the hill with 55% – if they were I’d have bought my house years ago.

Pricing and books is an interesting discussion – since the end of the Net Book Agreement the emphasis has been more and more on volume sales, mostly driven by the internet and discounting by Amazon. 50% off as a sales message has now become the standard message for frontlist – just look at the windows of any major bookseller on the high street.

This is, to a degree, the fault of book sellers themselves – in an attempt to retain market share in the face of the internet in over expanded square footage (Borders, and the out-of-town stores) and not looking to differentiate outside of price. However this can’t be said to be unusual in a commodity product market – and booksellers still do amazing promotions and support new authors and exciting books every day. Some of the recent Waterstone’s promotions have been great (the postcard stories, writer’s table etc).

What is a real challenge is to attempt to break out of a price driven offer – but I can’t see how this will happen easily. The web, pricing and availability has increased book sales overall, but to a declining set of customers.

Any suggestions?

Retailer distribution
(if online) shipping costs
Staff
Heat/Light etc
Returns
and then… the customer takes quite a significant discount off the remaining margin!