Bookworm: ‘Maybe we’re not as thick as the stats imply’

IS Scotland dumbing down? The latest figures on book sales don’t exactly paint an encouraging picture, with Scotland at the bottom of the table for UK regional book spending.

According to figures from Nielsen BookScan, the drop in sales is twice as bad in Northern Scotland (–10.6 per cent) and the Borders (–12.5 per cent) than it is in England (–5 per cent). Even in Central Scotland, sales are 8 per cent down.

But hold on: that’s not the whole story. While the Nielsen figures include new book sales from Amazon and other internet suppliers, they don’t include the new and used ones sold on Amazon Marketplace. Could that be where Scots are looking for their books? Certainly Ofcom’s July figures show that Scotland is leading the way in broadband take-up, so one might expect it.

And here’s another thing. While all bookshop sales feed into Nielsen’s figures, sales of books at book festivals are not included. And as Scotland has disproportionately more of them than England (48 at the last count), maybe we’re not as thick as the stats imply.

Certainly, book sales at the Edinburgh book festival last month defied the high street gloom by holding steady, and that could well be a trend. If it is, linking up with book festivals makes a lot of sense for publishers. So Dingwall-based Sandstone Press could well be on the ball with last week’s announcement that it is going to join in organising next year’s Inverness Book Festival, with publisher Robert Davidson taking over as festival director. Let’s hope he won’t only pick his own authors though.

REVIEW YOUR MORALS

One problem about buying from the internet, of course, is knowing whether or not the reviews of books – or, indeed, anything else – you might read there are bogus.

In a fascinating article by David Streitfeld in the New York Times about people who provide internet reviews for money, a data mining expert reckons that a third of all reviews are fake. Before he became disillusioned by the racket, Tulsa entrepreneur Todd Rutherford was coining $28,000 a month from writing online reviews. He charged $999 for 50.

It works, too. Last October John Locke bought 300 of them to boost sales of a thriller series. He has since written a book How I Sold One Million E-Books in Five Months – which curiously forgets to mention how he paid for Mr Rutherford’s help.