How Waterstone’s Done Killed Mah Dawg, Tooked Mah Wife And Steeled Mah Truck

The Guardian UK: How Waterstone’s Killed Bookselling

“They simply treat books as a commodity,” says Nicholas Spice, publisher of the London Review of Books, and one of the chain’s sternest critics. “There’s no sentiment to it. If it’s celebrity biographies that are going to sell, then that’s what they’ll focus on. They’re not looking at it from a cultural perspective.”

Translation: How dare they sell books like, like… um selling books! They are not acting like libraries and paying too much for our pretentious intellectual jerk off crap that no one wants to even read. How can we continue to make an honest living appealing to the financial whims of the popular culture? My agent will starve to death!

“There seems to be a frantic scramble in the book retail world to rush downmarket in order to compete with the challenges of Amazon, the supermarkets and next the ebook. Publishers have to fight their corner, year after year, against ever more aggressive demands for higher discounts from the chains, but seem at a loss to know how to cope with the underlying problems they face. They fear speaking out about how their books are being sold.”

Translation: Not I! I have journalistic integrititty! So I shall fight for the unworkable unmanageable business model that is rotting the major publishers from the inside and blame everyone else for my industries inherent lack of understanding of the new online markets or how to profit from the internet and those dirty dirty, nasty, baby killer eBooks. Did you know any unwashed riff raff can publish an eBook? I heard some even print those things and put them on bookshelves. How disgusting!

We are losing control of publishing so quick make the government protect us from market planning, reality, and inept long range management decisions.

Next week The Guardian investigates our ongoing national drug problems and the sudden drop of IQ amongst our reporters.

Tags: eBook Commentary