Friday, December 10, 2010

Units gone stale

Today I was standing in a bookshop queue behind a man who was asking if they stocked a particular title (I didn't catch which). The assistant looked it up on the computer and found that there was one copy in the warehouse, but none in the store. So far so helpful. And then he said these immortal words: 'It's ten years since that book was published. You won't find a book that old on our shelves.'

I trust he was exempting the works of great literature that are over 10 years old...

9 comments:

angelatopping said...

Read by 2020?

Nicola Morgan said...

I am not going to ask which bookshop because I don't want to know.

Sally Zigmond said...

I hope this was a case of an ill-informed, and possibly new, sales assistant and nothing more.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Don't know, Sally. I tried to engage him in conversation about it, but he kind of pretended he hadn't heard and attended to my purchase.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Elizabeth Baines' comment of 10 December on this blog is so unfair to the bookshop assistant in question and in my view so carelessly wrong in its conclusion that I feel compelled to address it and properly defend the bookshop assistant. In my view, this attempt by Elizabeth at a sangfroid attack on a bookshop assistant is in fact nothing more than foolish arrogance.

It seems clear from the blog description of the incident that the bookshop assistant was quite correct in his assumption that a book which has not been published for ten years would unlikely be on the shelves, but would rather (if any copies were in stock) be in the storeroom. There is naturally limited space on the shelves and so not all books in stock will be on the shelves. The management must make decisions about what to put out on the shelves and what to keep in the storeroom. These decisions are plainly made on the standard economic bases of popularity, demand etc.

Elizabeth might be surprised to discover that the "great works" to which she refers sold in bookshops today are not the original publications, but are in fact recent re-publications of the works of which there are many. She may be disappointed to learn that the bookshop in question will not have the original 1837 serials of The Pickwick Papers on its shelves (or indeed in its storeroom) but she will be able to purchase the Oxford University Press 2008 publication of the same without any to do. Due to the popularity of and demand for such "great works", in no small part due to their exceptional and enduring quality, they are re-published very frequently. The copyright in many of such "great works" has also expired which is another factor relevant to such regular re-publication of such works, increasing the margin of profit on re-publication and re-sale of such works as no licence is required.

The book referred to in this blog had not been published for ten years. This is obviously the "age" to which the bookshop assistant was referring, rather than, as misinterpreted, the date of its creation. Obviously, it was not an immediately recognisable popular classic and the fact that there was nevertheless a final copy of the book in stock further reinforces the fact that the book in question was likely not a wildly popular book.

As a result, the bookshop assistant was in my view being perfectly helpful in imparting his knowledge and experience to save the customer a prolongued search of the shelves which would have turned out to be fruitless, and he certainly did not owe a random busybody any further explanation. The attack on this shop assistant is all the more jarring when it is considered that he was doing an excellent job in helping this customer, quickly locating the last remaining stock copy for him. It is unfortunately a great shame that staff in the service industry have to endure this kind of lofty, arrogant, passive-aggressive attitude on an all too regular basis.

I suggest that Elizabeth reflects on her unfair, public attack on this diligent bookshop assistant, go and find him, apologise to him and refrain from posting such presumptuous comments in future.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Anonymous: It seems that my brevity and irony have opened me up to interpretations I never intended. I can’t see what in this description makes you interpret it as a personal attack on this bookshop assistant, since I refer to his helpfulness (‘so far so helpful’) and simply report a statement he makes, which, while I imply that the statement in itself is unhelpful, I do indeed take as an accurate voicing of company practice. Since however you raise the question of his conduct and mine, I will now assure you that both I and the man in the queue in front of me were perfectly courteous, whereas in point of fact the assistant seemed somewhat off-hand with us both, if not haughty and verging on rudeness, and made me, and I think the other customer, feel slightly cowed – an attitude I cannot imagine an employer finding ‘perfectly helpful’, since its likely effect is to alienate customers. I refrained from saying any of this on my blog, however, for two reasons: firstly, it occurred to me that his stiffness may have been caused by the fact that, like many booksellers I know, he was embarrassed by the situation and the company policy he was obliged to voice, and secondly, this blog is concerned with wider issues than the behaviour of individual shop assistants, but the publishing and marketing of books and the forces that determine which ones succeed (and become classics) and which ones don’t.

It seems from your comment that you are unaware that as late as ten years ago bookshops did indeed stock interesting books that had been published for some time but were still in print in their first editions, and acted to form and educate taste (and in the process extending the life of books), rather than simply responding to instant market demands in the way you describe. I presume you are using irony, indeed sarcasm, when you say that you imagine I would be surprised to know that the classics on sale are not in their original editions, but I was using irony myself when I referred to them. The point is that many of those classics were not instantly popular, and no book that is not instantly popular gets to be an enduring reprinted classic by being banished from the shelves for its lack of instant popularity.

The book the man wanted was not in the storeroom and therefore in stock as you assume, but in the warehouse (as I say in my post). Yet there was clearly a market for it, if an academic one: it was not a novel, but a technical textbook which he had obviously been recommended for academic purposes. (He had already had a fruitless search of the shelves where he had expected to find it, before asking the assistant for help.) The assistant asked him if he would like him to order it, but he declined, clearly needing the book more urgently, and I must say seeming rather fed up. For the writer of that book this is all very ominous: that copy in the warehouse fails to sell, although the man wanted it so badly; the book thus fails to be reordered by the distributor; finally, the publisher gives up on it too and it falls out of print. And because the students can’t get hold of it, the lecturers drop it from the syllabus, and the book fails to become a classic even if it had the potential. In this way, it seems to me, bookshops do not simply respond to market pressure but act to depress certain book-buying markets. The assistant’s parting statement that ‘you won’t find a book that old on our shelves’ implies that usefulness and quality are no longer factors in the selling of books, but have been replaced by fashion and the mass market, a point which your own explanation seems to prove, and while the situation may be understandable, it struck gloom in the heart of this novelist standing by.

Elizabeth Baines said...
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Elizabeth Baines said...

I would add, Anonymous, that if you are a bookseller - which the strength of your feelings about this incident would seem to suggest - then publicly accusing me of ‘foolish arrogance’ and of being a ‘random busybody’ with so little evidence and under cover of anonymity, and indeed failing to address me directly on my own blog, does not strengthen your argument that discourtesy and passive-aggression are all on the side of the customers.