Reflections on the book trade from the man who wants his shops back

The week in which HMV completed its £63 million takeover of Ottakar’s — and announced that Ottakar’s bookshops will be rebranded as Waterstone’s, which HMV already owns — seems a good moment to contemplate the future of the book trade in the virtual and digital age. There is something so unchangeably pleasing about the feel of a book in the hand and the ambience of a room full of books that it is hard to imagine the demise of the traditional well-stocked bookshop, what-ever alternatives technology may offer. And yet our own book-buying habits are the best indication of the speed of change.

Take me, for instance: I am often on the lookout for plays suitable for my am-dram troupe, and late the other night I was struggling to recall the name of one by Somerset Maugham that I saw at the National Theatre in the 1970s. In half a minute, not only had the Amazon online shop jogged my memory — it was For Services Rendered, which turned out, on revisiting, to be a rather bitter old piece — but one of its Marketplace sellers had sold me a 1991 paperback stamped ‘Leicestershire Libraries: Withdrawn from Stock’ which arrived by post two days later.