Essential reading

After a sec­ond Sant Jordi’s Day – Cat­alo­nia’s an­nual cel­e­bra­tion of books – held under strict health re­stric­tions, the book sec­tor is still stand­ing. The re­la­tion­ship be­tween book­seller and cus­tomer is un­like that in other type of shop, and a book­shop is more than just a re­tailer: “It’s a cul­tural cen­tre, a so­cial cen­tre, a meet­ing place... There’s noth­ing quite like a book­shop,” says Maria Carme Fer­rer, book­seller and head of Cat­alo­nia’s As­so­ci­a­tion of Book­sellers. The as­so­ci­a­tion brings to­gether 234 book­shops, al­though with other book re­tail­ers that do not meet the de­f­i­n­i­tion of a book­shop the num­ber of es­tab­lish­ments rises to over 800. Fer­rer con­firms that “the most book­shops are af­fil­i­ated,” and that 99% of turnover in the sec­tor comes from af­fil­i­ated mem­bers.

There is no county in Cat­alo­nia that does not have at least one book­shop, with the typ­i­cal es­tab­lish­ment being “a medium-sized and gen­eral, non-spe­cial­ist book­shop,” al­though Fer­rer points out that after the 2008 fi­nan­cial cri­sis, a good num­ber of small book­shops began to emerge, many of which were spe­cial­ist out­lets. Is this an in­di­ca­tion of the vi­a­bil­ity of a busi­ness like this? Fer­rer says that while some have opened, oth­ers have closed: “The prob­lem with book­shops is that there is no gen­er­a­tional change, but we are see­ing new ones with the de­sire to fill the spaces left empty by oth­ers.”

Book­shops are widely con­sid­ered to be es­sen­tial and now they are of­fi­cially recog­nised as such. In Sep­tem­ber 2020, in the midst of the tur­moil caused by the pan­demic, the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment de­clared cul­ture an es­sen­tial asset. Yet, this was not enough, as new health re­stric­tions in Jan­u­ary meant book­shops had to close on Sat­ur­days like other, non-es­sen­tial, shops. Yet, the sec­tor per­se­vered and book­shops are now ef­fec­tively con­sid­ered es­sen­tial re­tail out­lets.

“The gov­ern­ment con­sid­ered cul­ture es­sen­tial and then shut us down. We didn’t un­der­stand, but we fought on until we suc­ceeded hav­ing book­shops con­sid­ered es­sen­tial,” says the as­so­ci­a­tion head. The need to keep these havens for books open was not only de­manded by the sec­tor but also by read­ers. “In the past year, they have con­tin­ued to buy from us on so­cial media, by email, by tele­phone… It’s the cus­tomer who sees book­shops as es­sen­tial,” adds Fer­rer.

While book­shops have been forced to close on many days dur­ing the pan­demic and have been sub­ject to re­stricted open­ing times, sales have not dropped com­pared to pre-pan­demic fig­ures in 2019. In fact, sales have gone up. “Sales have gone well, per­haps not for every­one, as it de­pends on fac­tors like lo­ca­tion, but things have gone re­ally well,” ac­cord­ing to Fer­rer. In­creased sales by them­selves, how­ever, do not mean end­ing the year in the black. Fer­rer puts the losses for 2020 at up to 20%, while the per­cent­age of book­shops that have had to fur­lough­ing staff is close to 100%. In 2019 (the last year with fig­ures), all book­shops and points of sale in Cat­alo­nia had a turnover of 1.21 bil­lion euros, of which 417 mil­lion cor­re­sponded to book­shops, 252 mil­lion to chains, and 99 mil­lion to su­per­mar­kets, ac­cord­ing to the Span­ish Fed­er­a­tion of Pub­lish­ers As­so­ci­a­tions.

The pan­demic has changed the way things work: “From the first mo­ment of lock­down we had to re­think a lot of things. We’ve changed the way we host pre­sen­ta­tions, read­ing clubs, sign­ings... Every­thing has changed! We’ve rein­vented our­selves and we’ve opted for im­prov­ing our web­sites, for home de­liv­ery, for so­cial media... It was that or dying,” says Fer­rer.

fea­ture book­shops