Discounting Tempers Potter Excitement

Discounting frustrates U.S. indies, while some U.K. booksellers will not carry the title

by Andrew Rosenheim & Jim Milliot -- Publishers Weekly, 2/12/2007

The long-awaited announcement that the last volume in the Harry Potter series will be published in the U.S. and in the U.K. on July 21 has failed to still rumblings of discontent from Britain's independent booksellers. A recent survey by the trade journal the Bookseller revealed that as many as 25% of British independents do not plan to stock Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Faced with heavy discounting of the £17.99 list price by supermarkets, large chains and online vendors, many smaller booksellers said they will not even bother to compete.

"There's no point," said Adam Powell, co-owner of Crockatt and Powell, a new bookshop near London's Waterloo Station. "It would be an insult to our customers. I'd feel guilty about selling it to them at a much higher price than they'd find in a supermarket." Tesco, the U.K.'s largest supermarket chain and a rising force in bookselling, is offering pre-order copies of Potter at £9.97, and Woolworth's has it at £9.99. Determined to keep up with these new outlets for books, Britain's largest book chain, Waterstones, is offering the Rowling title at just £8.99—or 50% off its list price.

In the U.S., where bookstores have dealt with discounting from other retailers for much longer than their U.K. counterparts, all independents contacted by PW said they will stock Deathly Hallows, although many said they have not yet decided how much they will charge for the book. "We're haven't quite figured out what we're going to do," said Josie Leavitt, co-owner of the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vt. "We're probably going to treat it like an adult hardcover and give it a 25% discount. No kid can afford $35."

Several booksellers will offer discounts in the 20% to 25% range on pre-orders. And many booksellers said they will order cautiously. "We'll order carefully, and if we run out we'll end up going to Sam's to restock," said Ellen Scott, children's book buyer at the Bookworm in Omaha, Neb. "It's cheaper there than ordering from Scholastic. That's what we did last time."

Despite the price pressure exerted by retailers and e-tailers, many independent booksellers in both the U.S. and U.K. feel they must stock Deathly Hallows. If you don't sell the title, said Carol Stoltz, part owner of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., "you're giving your business to Amazon." Leavitt said if she chose to not sell the title, "you're letting the discounters and big chains win. I don't want my customers to have to go to Costco or the supermarket for a book." In the U.K., Mark Thornton, owner of Mostly Books, a shop in the market town of Abingdon near Oxford, said, "It would be letting them [customers] down not to stock Harry Potter."

For Anita Zager, owner of Northern Lights Books & Gifts in Duluth, Minn., the big concern is not the discount but the embargo. Zager is worried that outlets that don't usually carry Scholastic titles, like grocery stores and gas stations, won't respect the embargo. "Since this is the last book, what are the repercussions going to be for disregarding the embargo?" she wondered. Zager said she hopes Scholastic will delay shipping books to nontraditional accounts by a day or two.

Independent booksellers in the U.S. who have traditionally thrown Potter parties indicated they most likely will again this year. In the U.K., however, the release of a new Potter, once a cause for celebration throughout the British bookselling world, now symbolizes the threat to independent bookstores posed by the new muscle in the marketplace of supermarkets and online sellers such as Amazon. Scott Pack, former chief buyer at Waterstones, goes so far as to declare in his book blog that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows "is no longer a book. It is actually a book-shaped tin of beans that supermarkets will pile high and sell at a loss."