Level playing field? That’s like demanding a level playing field for buses, trains and planes because they are all part of the transport system.

Meryl Halls, CEO of the UK trade organisation for booksellers, warned of a “brutal” 2023 and called for publishers to support bookstores in her end of year address as reported in The Bookseller.

Halls acknowledged that,

after the surreal boom time for book sales through the pandemic lockdowns and their aftermath, 2022 was always going to be a year of recalibration and consolidation in the UK and in Ireland.

This is a welcome dose of realism amid the nonsense from many publishing CEOs riding high on that 2021 sales boom as if they personally made it happen, and all too slow to talk about the realities unfolding in 2022-23.

Halls herself sees little room for cheer in 2023, but as so often with bricks & mortar-focussed booksellers, all the blame must be laid on Amazon:

While it’s heartening to see the EU start to crack down on Amazon’s egregious behaviour with its own Marketplace (an investigation the BA contributed to, as we have to our own CMA’s similar investigation), Amazon continues to twist markets out of shape, and obtain preferential treatment in too many places, and the BA will continue to advocate vocally – with you, our trade suppliers, as well as with government, with regulators, consumers and the media – to level the playing field for bookshops.

Yeah, that pesky Amazon. Always the bad guy, twisting markets out of shape and demanding preferential treatment. Let’s level the playing field for bookshops.

Bu that’s a convenient conceit that ignores reality instead of confronting it. Not that is made any difference in the UK anyway, but Amazon is no longer in the bricks & mortar game and is once again online only.

And online selling is a totally different ballgame from bricks & mortar selling, so talk of a level playing field is nonsensical.

Amazon cannot offer the personalised service, the discovery and the sheer physical appeal of a b&m store, while b&m stores have physical overheads and staffing constraints that Amazon does not. The cost of delivering cartons of print books to stores all over the country is obviously significantly higher than delivering truckloads of print books to a handful of Amazon warehouses. Amazon is open 24/7/365, while b&m stores operate on a high street business hours model.

Each business model has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages, and both parties have tried their hand at the other’s modus operandi. Many b&m stores have significant online operations alongside. Amazon ‘s attempt to compete in the b&m arena ultimately failed.

Level playing field? That’s like demanding a level playing field for buses, trains and planes because they are all part of the transport system.

B&m booksellers need to play their many strengths and stop blaming the other guy for its problems.

Halls’ predictable tirade against Amazon might have carried more credibility if she had also denounced Waterstones, the biggest bookstore chain in the UK, which is demanding an 85% discount from publishers on frontlist titles in January.

If that’s not “twisting markets out of shape and demanding preferential treatment” then what is?