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What a shame. As a 10-year publishing phenomenon reaches its climax it’s been turned into nothing more than a supermarket price war.

This morning, or just after midnight last night to be accurate, the final volume in the seven-book Harry Potter saga went on sale, and his journey came to what Rowling called a pretty clear conclusion.

But the real story for media watchers is how the closing of the series has robbed publisher Bloomsbury of the clout it once had with the retail outlets. Throughout the life of the series it has been able to dictate on-sale dates and apply strict embargoes to which the publishers would stick. They did it ostensibly for the good of the reading public and avoid spoiling kids’ enjoyments of the fairly predictable surprises, but we all know that the real reason they’ve complied is that they’ve been terrified they might be robbed of the chance to sell the next instalment.

Well now there is no ‘next instalment’, and while nobody has broken the embargo - on this side of the Atlantic, at least - they are playing dirty on the price, using the book as a loss-leader to drag customers into their stores.

Bloomsbury sells it wholesale at a little over £9, and stamps a retail price of £17.99 onto the cover. Amazon significantly undercut this, and independent retailers wailed about not being able to compete, quite rightly.

But if they’re the Potters of our story, then Voldemort must be Asda, which is set to take a massive loss by punting the novels at £5 a pop. Naturally its online store has already ’sold out’, which is rather convenient as it means we’ll have to venture in-store to snap up the deals. And while we’re there impulse buy a ready-cooked chicken, a pasty and a bag of frozen chips to make up for Asda’s the loss.

You could almost say they planned it that way.

So it’s Asda, once the consumer’s champion that bought from local suppliers and sold at affordable prices, not Amazon, that turns out to be the nemesis of the independent bookshop. The purveyor of cut-price brands looks set to cut deep into the profits of an already under-pressure sector of the high street, and could do significant damage to our future ability to walk into a store where the staff understand and love books, and know how to order a rare or out-of-print novel.

With this in mind I went down to Waterstones in Piccadilly to show the assembled queues some support, but I needn’t have bothered. They were queuing around the block, and the place was mobbed with foreign TV queues reporting on ‘ze krayzee Breetesh’ who wait out in the torrential rain to buy a book they could have got cheaper online.

The irony is, the majority of the voices in the queue didn’t sound British at all, implying a fair few Europeans have actually taken time of work and bought tickets to come and stand in line along a busy London street.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 21st, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Books, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.