New leaf for local shops as Amazon's flow turns

No longer considered dusty relics left too long on the shelf, but fine wines that have improved with age, they have found a renaissance in returning trade from former regulars disaffected with the excesses of online retailers.

As 30 of Yorkshire’s local booksellers prepare to take part in Independent Bookshop Week, an annual celebration of their trade, a pattern began to emerge.

Customers, disenfranchised by what they saw as the antisocial practices of large web-based warehouses like Amazon, had registered a protest by going back to basics and buying in their own back yards.

“We are definitely seeing people coming in here as an anti-Amazon gesture,” said Mike Sansbury, manager of The Grove Bookshop in the centre of Ilkley, which has been trading for nearly 40 years.

“Amazon is always going to be competition for us and we can never hope to compete with the kind of discounts they do or their availability because they buy in such huge numbers – but there has been a real backlash recently of people choosing to not give them their custom,” Mr Sansbury said.

“People have said to me that they don’t like reading about how little tax they pay, and, more recently, about the sort of conditions some of their people work in. They don’t want to subsidise any of that.

“They would rather come to a shop like ours, have the books nicely wrapped and have a discussion about them with someone – even if they do have to pay a couple of pounds more.”

The Grove, whose staff includes the country’s oldest bookseller, 88 year-old Barbara Steel, is among the shops to have signed up to the Hive website, an alternative to Amazon which sells at a discount but delivers to the nearest physical bookshop.

“We get a small percentage of the price and it brings people into the shop, where they can have a look around and maybe buy something else,” Me Sansbury said.

Independent Bookshop Week, which involves around 400 sellers nationally, will see a series of readings and other events, many focused on the work of the fantasy novelist Philip Pullman.

To encourage children to read during the summer holidays, some shops are offering writing competitions with prizes of the winning child’s height in books.

In York, the Little Apple Bookshop, within sight of the Minster, is seeing a similar trend. Its staff includes the writer Fiona Mozley, whose debut novel, Elmet, made last year’s shortlist for the Man Booker Prize.

She told The Yorkshire Post: “People are realising that part of the pleasure of reading a book is in going out to a local shop and buying it – in having a physical object that has been painstakingly and beautifully produced by the publisher and well presented in a shop.

“High streets are struggling but independent bookshops provide a real nucleus to a lot of towns. People feel that can go in and have a chat with someone and buy a book they they’ll get a lot of pleasure from.”

Bigger bookstores, too, may be feeling the anti-Amazon effect. The York branch of Waterstones devoted a window display to Ms Mozley’s novel when it made the Man Booker shortlist.

She said: “They are technically our rivals, but they were very supportive. There is a camaraderie between physical bookshops against online retailers. It’s us together against the bigger threat.”

Philippa Morris, who co-owns the Little Apple Bookshop, said the renaissance of printed books was seeing off the electronic variety.

“There’s a feeling now that Kindles are passé,” she said. “People say they’re still fine for taking on the plane on holiday, but not for using at home.”

A further marker of the tide having turned was to be found in industry figures which revealed that for the first time last year, more independent bookstores opened than closed, although the difference was only one shop.

Ms Morris said: “People cherish independent shops and we’re lucky in Yorkshire to have lots. I get visitors from other parts of the UK bemoaning the fact that there are none where they live.”