ON HARRY

Pre-sales up 17%. I wonder how many small bookshops have ordered from Amazon in order to fill their shelves from now until autumn, while being careful to order a reasonable number from Bloomsbury so that suspicions are not aroused? I don't blame them -- sadly, if there are several out there doing this they'll have to keep quiet about it. My experience of watching Potter fans buying in supermarkets is that they came, they bought one book, they departed. Maybe a few more carrots and tinned tomatoes got sold but nothing that would not have passed through the stores in the first place. It's not a loss leader as such. What it does do, and believe me there are people out there who still don't know this, is demonstrate, through miles of column inches and years of broadcast hours, that the stores also sell books. I'm afraid the old-fashioned local bookshop is doomed in the same way that the old-fashioned record shop died. It should be pretty bloody obvious by now that the entire industry is geared to MASS sales. Twas ever thus. We live in a commercial world. However, the problem with this approach is the appalling standard of books on sale. They're all so similar that the next author/agent/publisher to come up with a well-written story departing from these simplistic genres is going to clean up. I also foresee a time when an e-book browsing store will open, allowing customers to view millions of books - not on the same day, of course - and either have it printed off there and then or ordered from an Amazon-style warehouse for delivery the following day. To sum up, the appetite for reading has not diminished just the point-of-sale is going through a period of painful change. And by way of being even more boring than normal, let me repeat that Potter sells because it's got LOTS of characters and LOTS of story. In fact, it's the opposite of yer usual supermarket top seller. Go read.