Young "Bookseller" of the Year

I was fascinated to read, today, of the nominations for the Young Bookseller of the Year Award. It seems to me that these nominations encapsulate much of what is wrong with bookselling today.

First, let me say that I do not know any of the people involved and I'm sure that all of them are interesting, care about books and do an excellent job for the companies they work for.

They are not, however, booksellers and this is what troubles me.

Booksellers are the people who actually sell books, face to face, to real readers. They are the folk who man the tills and run sections in bookshops. The more committed of them actually own the shops in which they work. These are the people at the sharp end of the trade and I'd argue that they are the people to whom we all owe our livings.

The problem, for me, is that bookselling and publishing seem to treat booksellers with a steadily diminishing regard. In the chains they are robbed of influence, stimulation and experience by an increasing tendency to centralise. And as the chains drive to de-skill them the publishers give up talking to them.

It's interesting the all three nominees for this award are buyers. Buyers, of course, are now the people that matter because rather than buying for individual shops they are buying for hundreds. It's not an easy job, I'm sure, but, at one remove from the front line, it's made harder by the absence of customers in the day-to-day working environment.

Back when I were a lad we bought the stock for the shop in the shop. Nothing was scaled out from bleak, over-airconditioned Head Offices. This meant that if we screwed up we either had to look at our errors piled, not selling, on tables every single day until we could return it; or we had to endure the scorn of customers when we didn't have the latest title to tickle the zeitgeist until we managed to secure stock. If you never see the stock and you never see the customers how do you approach your job with any humility. A spreadsheet showing that you have 1,000 more copies than you need does not equate to the 50 useless books you have to work around in store for the next three months. It's too abstract and the lessons it teaches are not sufficiently painful to be of any use.

There are, of course, economies of scale that are used to excuse central buying but they do not take into account (how can they?) that reading is an intensely individual experience. Those of us who read a lot are the key customers of all bookshops and we want variety and we want bookshops run by well informed staff who love books as much as we do. An industry who ignores those people does not deserve to succeed.

I expect the three nominees used to work in bookshops at the beginning of their careers but the route up and out seems to be the only route to be encouraged nowadays. At least if you want to be "someone". Who wants to stay serving customers and working at weekends when you can slowly desiccate in front of a PC talking only to people from publishers who also never see real readers because they done away with all of their reps.

I was going to draw this to a sensible and succinct conclusion but I can't. I'm just too pissed off. Bookselling as it stands is rubbish. Readers don't get what they want and booksellers are not employed, anymore, to do all the jobs they are capable of because some MBA Monkey wants to control everything. If we are losing out to the internet and the supermarkets it's because we stopped doing what we were good at and started to be "retailers". The end is in sight and we will get what we deserve for allowing this to happen.