End of the line ... Ottakar's bookshop in London
Photograph: Matthew Fearn/ PA
So that's that, then. The news today that the competition commission is minded to give HMV the go-ahead to bid for the book chain Ottakar's effectively removes the only remaining barrier holding the music retailer back from the road to high street dominion.
HMV, as anyone who has been following this rarefied turkey shoot will know, is the parent company of Waterstone's, which is already the UK's largest bookseller. If HMV do decide to overlook Ottakar's plummeting profits (the company yesterday reported a pre-tax loss of £4.6m for 2005) it will end up in control of just a whisker under a quarter of the British book market.
The task with which the commission was charged was to judge whether such a move by HMV would reduce competition in the books trade at the local level and therefore push up book prices. As such, they can be justified in feeling that they have done their job. In their assessment, firstly, there are few places in which branches of Ottakar's and Waterstone's are in close proximity, and secondly, in the places where this is the case, it appears to have little effect on the "range of books and quality of service" of either. In short, the commission concluded that "the effect of competition between Waterstone's and Ottakar's at the local level seems limited."
While this may well be true, from the perspective of the book-buying public - us, in other words - the commission has spectacularly missed the point. There is little doubt that the prices of books in such an uber-bookshop would remain at affordable levels due to the pressure exerted by the cut-price deals offered in supermarkets and on the internet. But such "competitive" pricing will ultimately only be visible at the bestselling end of the market - in the 200 or so titles that make it onto the three-for-two piles stacked at the front of the shop. And cheap copies of Dan Brown are not the only thing we want - indeed require - from the UK's foremost bookseller. What are those of us who aren't interested in reading the latest Dan Brown (or John Grisham or Danielle Steele - or for that matter Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguro) supposed to do?
The biographer Michael Holroyd, one of the many authors who has become involved in the fight against the takeover, summed up the problem well in an interview with The Observer last November. "Waterstone's choose about 5,000 books a year and promote them so that they sell tremendously - at the expense of other books," he said. "If a book isn't taken up within a month, it is replaced. Ottakar's, on the other hand, gives books more time to take off. There are two categories of books - the tortoises and the hares. If this deal goes ahead, we will end up with all hares and no tortoises." And it's not just authors who are apprehensive; figures from across the industry have voiced their concerns. Just last week I spoke to a representative from the Booksellers' Association, who told me that in his opinion, an Ottakar's takeover would have a devastating effect on publishers' chances of introducing debut novelists - or even the lesser-known works of popular authors - to new readers.
And the Ottakar's story is just the visible face of what is happening to independent bookshops across the UK. Although Ottakar's is a chain, it shares many of the strengths and weaknesses of the independents. Its branches are locally run by staff who are sensitive to the needs of their local communities and choose their stock accordingly (in contrast with Waterstone's, which nowadays operates a policy of centralised buying), but it has neither the revenue nor the advertising clout to compete on a pricing basis with the bigger shops. As a result, Ottakar's have seen their sales and profits falling, making a buyout ever more likely.
At the end of the day, now the competition commission has lain down, there is no way to prevent HMV from buying Ottakar's if they want to. But if you care about preserving diversity and depth above and beyond the availability of bestsellers at bargain basement prices, there is still something you can do: support the independents. Find your nearest small or secondhand bookshop, and instead of automatically logging on to Amazon or nipping into Waterstone's in your lunch hour, wait until you have an hour or so to spare and pay them a visit instead. You won't always have the time or the inclination, but if you want your local independent still to be open on the occasions that you do, you need to give it your custom. They need you, and let's face it, if the HMV deal goes ahead, you're going to need them, too.
