London Book Fair

Like farmers coming to London for the annual Dairy Show, we booksellers make an annual pilgrimage to the London Book Fair which this year was held at the rather bleak new Excel centre in Docklands. The major publishers have impressive displays of their wares but, increasingly, this show is not for booksellers, but for the marketing of rights in books. Sure there were plenty of booksellers around and about (coaches had been organised to bring them in from the shires), but we're a dying breed as more and more book sales are channelled through Amazon and the supermarkets. Even Borders have announced awful trading figures in the UK and it is said that every bookshop in Britain has a "For Sale" sign outside.

And like a farmer up in town for a Dairy Show I tramped the acres of exhibits with mud still on my feet from an invigorating walk earlier in the day. All I was looking for was "novelty", new ideas which might bring fortune to my ailing business. There wasn't much to get excited about though. An Irish entrepreneur had brought along a smart vending machine for the top-selling paperbacks - the perfect twenty-four hour bookshop with low staffing overheads. An impressive stand from Cardoza - the "largest gaming and gambling publisher in the world" was doing business with instruction manuals on Texas Hold'em Poker tactics.


Google had an impressive display and were mounting a charm offensive to try and silence critics of their Google Book Search mission (where the Google searcher is actually searching every page of every book ever published). Whether or not their efforts will be rewarded is entirely up to the publishing community, but it is a brave initiative.

To cheer myself up I listened to a doomsday presentation given by Tim Renner, former CEO of Universal Music in Germany. His theme was "lessons booksellers and publishers can learn about the digitisation of content in the music industry", and lesson one was that an explosion in downloading of book content will certainly occur within the next eighteen months. Happily, if the music industry is anything to go by, the book publishing industry shouldn't lose more than half of their annual revenues and there will still be room for good, well-produced, physical books in the world after the book-equivalents of Napster and the iPod have taken their toll.

Ah well!