Guess how much . . .
As my wife is Norwegian I am instantly qualified to socio-analyse the Norwegian people, particularly their inability to queue, and their national obsession with Grandiosa brand pizza.
I spend most of my time when I’m there moaning about such things, I’m telling you: the radio stations’ play-lists haven’t been updated for 20 years - seriously 20 years. It’s the same every time I go. I like Alphaville’s Forever Young as much as the next person, but it doesn’t belong on a modern radio station - Move on Norway!
In a recent advertising campaign offering Norwegians the chance to vote for a new kind of pizza (beef and onion or ham and pepper) more people voted for the eventual winner (beef and onion) than voted for the party that won the Norwegian national elections. Enough said.
However every time I go there I also have a look around the bookstores. The first thing you notice is that they don’t do offers in Norwegian bookstore’s. There’s no 3 for 2, there’s no discounting, no money off, no Buy One Get One Free or Half price. Everything is full whack, asking price, RRP.
This leads you notice the second thing about Norwegian bookstores which is the price of the books. To pick an unrelated example at random I picked up Gone by Michael Grant in hardback.
Guess how much it was? Go on guess?
Nope.
Nope.
You are way off.
Gone was on sale for 339 Norwegian Kroner.
That’s £32!! or $48!!
£32!! or $48!!
It’s supposed to be a kids book! What kid can afford that on a weeks allowance?! Well - Norwegian kids apparently because there was only 1 left on the shelf.
So as a publisher I’m jealous of Norwegian bookstore’s enormously high profit margins, but not their attitude towards politics and pizzas.
Actually the biggest tragedy is that reading isn’t big in Norway, despite the fact that it’s dark and cold most of the time. They’d rather watch blu-ray DVDs on big screen TVs instead. Oh - and occasionally they go skiing.
This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 8:17 am by Alistair Spalding and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 9th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Maybe reading would be more popular if books were more affordable –? Then again, maybe not.
December 9th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
It feels right to me to know that there are places where a book is still precious. OK, I’m old-school and sentimental. That’s why I still buy a hardback now and again, as a gift, rather than wait for a cheap paperback that feels - cheap.
In my exotic foreign country, we pay a lot for books too. There are actually laws that require bookstores to ask publisher’s cover price, including import costs etc., and there is a good reason. My local bookseller would never survive if s/he had to compete with the mass-market bookvendors who press at the gates - it’s FNAC here, maybe Borders or something there…? The cynical among us would say, what do I care, just give me those rock-bottom prices, and minimal choice from among only the very top sellers.
I’d rather spend a little time with my neighbourhood libraire, who knows me and my interests, who keeps thing aside for me, who can spend time discussing the wares with me, who can find me books I didn’t know about yet, who engages me on the influences of the Lumières on modern Syrian fiction, which I find out later was the subject of her PhD dissertation. Paying a higher margin on books keeps me in contact with another grade of book dealer, and is cheaper than psychoanalysis.
And that goes for kids books too. And if I’m really desperate, Amazon.com has finally figured out how to ship overseas, though it does nearly double the cost of the book. Why don’t we work on bringing down shipper’s costs and import duties, rather than booksellers’ miserable margins?
Another factor (of what, I’m not sure yet…): I have in my neighbourhood: Normal bookstores, which have French and Swiss-French publications, and usually a German and Italian section as well, and usually an English section; if that doesn’t work, I also have English-language bookstores, and Spanish, Portugese, and Arabic within a 500-meter radius of home. Keeping all of that on hand must be a little more costly than limiting your stock to the top-ten bestsellers.
Quality before quantity before price, and let people earn a living without buckling under to generic market forces. Seems like authors and publishers could find some solace here.
I think I agree with Carol’s “maybe not.”
December 9th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
48 bucks? And they made me cut out all the good parts!
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:15 am
[...] by the similarities of the UK and NOR systems. They also set me straight on an issue that I had previously maligned Norwegians for: Actually the biggest tragedy is that reading isn’t big in Norway, [...]