Bookaholism – not dead, but probably terminal
August 20th, 2009 by Vanessa
A couple of months ago there was lots of hoo-ha about the Booksellers’ Association embracing of ‘bookaholism’ as an ‘over-arching pan-industry marketing concept’. It didn’t meet with a great deal of enthusiasm when it was written about in The Bookseller – I would say ‘discussed’ but there’s not been any discussion in print, only in the comments section on The Bookseller’s online edition – and when I wrote about it here and here the idea was given fairly short shrift by our commenters. Since then I haven’t met a single customer, rep, author, newspaper literary editor, bookseller or publisher who think it’s a good idea. But what do we know? Very little apparently, or so I was told.
Even the architect of the scheme didn’t receive a lot of support when he attempted to justify this initiative - when people have a problem with linking book-buying with addiction and all its associated problems, starting an article with ‘my name is Damien Horner and I am a bookaholic’ hardly helps to refute accusations of being crass, trivialising the AA movement, insensitive… I don’t need to go on, you get my drift.
It’s all been very quiet since then – over six weeks of perfect peace where most of us assumed that the BA had listened to members and quietly put this idea out of its misery. But then this appeared on The Bookseller’s news page yesterday morning, and will, I presume be in Friday’s print edition. It seems that Tesco think it’s a fab idea and are going to run with it
And that’s now a bigger problem than the actual concept. From an independent bookseller’s point of view, there is no value whatsoever in us adopting the same marketing strategy as Tesco. If they decide to use this and we do as well then we lose all the individuality that makes independent bookshops successful – why would we want to appear so amorphous and blend in with a supermarket?
In a way, those us who derided ‘bookaholism’ should now be grateful to Tesco – now that they’ve adopted this ‘pan-industry initiative’ it has no relevance whatsoever for the rest of us.
Your logic is excellent Vanessa. Bookaholism never had any relevance to serious bookselling. It is a silly idea. Baked beans and marmalade belong to the newspaper not a good book.
What I didn’t like was the bullying tone DH took with you – and on your own web site, of all places. I love Tesco, really, I do. Great for anything larder-related. But I prefer to buy my books from you.
Gosh, actually, thinking of the names involved, I’m wondering if the dreaded Power Station fiasco might have a bearing on this?