Borders UK Closes its Doors

Peter Kilborn | 01/19/2010

Since my last post in November, much of the trade talk has been around the slow and painful death of Borders UK (no longer a relation of the US business) which expired with the closure of all its forty-five stores two days before Christmas.

You might say that that’s hardly a digital issue – no one is claiming Borders’ demise is a direct result of digital competition – but of course in today’s world everything is connected to everything else. The significance of this event lies in the changing pattern of publishers’ trading and the end of a chapter in book retailing. Since Tim Waterstone changed the face of high street book retailing in the early 80s, we have had competition from excellent nationwide bookshops from Dillons (bought out of administration by Waterstone’s), Ottakar’s (acquired by Waterstone’s), and Borders (now defunct). Now we just have Waterstone’s as a dedicated bookseller and, even with a near monopoly, struggling to find a role. We still have W H Smith, of course, successfully doing what it does best, but not really a range bookseller.

It didn’t take the death of Borders to say that Amazon is the big winner: they were a big winner already. They have a commanding share of the UK online market, and they have range, heavily discounted prices and outstanding customer service.

The Nielsen BookScan sales tracking service, which tracks in excess of 90% of all retail and online book sales, reported that sales held up well in 2009, with a volume decline of just 0.5% (1.2% by value). 235.7 million book units were sold at a cost of £1.752bn.

It’s impossible to say, though, what these results reflect: the impact of the recession, substitution by e-books, or special factors like Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown. But it’s certainly a lot of books! What is clear, though, is that the impact of e-books on overall book consumption so far is next to negligible. Whether this will continue to be true as those people who unwrapped e-readers on Christmas Day start downloading e-books will take some time to emerge, but it seems unlikely that Christmas 2009 was any kind of watershed moment for digital content.

2010 will undoubtedly be an interesting and challenging year for the publishing industry and it seems certain that ‘digital’ will continue to dominate the headlines. There may not be anything dramatic that marks out the end of the book trade as we know it: it will be the gradual growth of digital alternatives to books and the appropriate strategic responses which will be the preoccupation of book trade executives.

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