How a bookshop stays open selling something cheaper elsewhere

A bookshop can't win on price, so it stays open by selling what the cheaper place can't stock: someone who knows what you'll like, and a reason to come back. The book is what gets rung up at the till. I suspect it's the smaller part of why you came.

Same book, same cover

A New Straits Times columnist ran the comparison I'd have run. One title, same edition, was under RM30 at a chain known for its wide, affordable selection, and "three times more" at an independent shop in the city.¹

That's one book in one column, so it isn't a survey. The column's conclusion was kinder than you might expect: owners have rent and running costs to cover, so they have the right to raise their prices.

But how can one shop sell the same object for a fraction of another's price? Part of the answer is a word I like a lot, which is remaindered.

The cheap copy has a back story

Remaindered books are the ones that sat unsold and went back to the publisher. Monocle's piece on Malaysian bookshops says many are pulped, while some publishers sell them on at "vastly reduced prices" to shops that can then discount heavily and still make money.

One chain that does this went from eight shops before the pandemic to 19 in July 2022.² I don't know that the columnist's cheap copy was a remainder. It would explain how the gap gets so wide, though, because the publisher has already given up on that book.

Small sellers have noticed. The co-founder of one Petaling Jaya shop told The Edge in 2020 that new small booksellers "tend to focus on discount or remaindered books because of their lighter inventory cost".

Who sets the price of a new one?

Not the shop, according to one bookseller. In that same Edge piece, the director of Silverfish Books says Anglo-American publishers control most of the Malaysian and Singaporean markets, which gives them the power to decide prices and who gets which shelf in the big stores.

He's a publisher as well as a bookseller, so he has a side. I'm taking it as one informed view.

Some countries settle this by law. France has barred discounts of more than 5% on new books since 1981, and Monocle says that was to protect independents from the chains.² I haven't come across a Malaysian version.

The gap I can't find in print

If the shop doesn't set the price, its money is in what it pays for the book. I couldn't find a current figure for what a distributor charges a small Malaysian shop.

The best I found is old, a University of Stirling thesis on publishing in Peninsular Malaysia, dated 1996. It says the channels of distribution get "the usual discounts" of 20 to 40 per cent, depending on the kind of book.⁴

That range covers everyone in the chain, not small shops alone. My guess is that a big buyer sits near the top of it and a small one somewhere lower, and I can't show you anyone saying so in print.

Where a RM50 cover price might go, my rough guess

Say the shop keeps fifteen ringgit on a fifty-ringgit book. A rent of three thousand ringgit then needs two hundred books a month before anyone's paid, which is about seven a day, every day.

That's a lot of books to sell to people who could find them cheaper by looking at their phones.

So what's paying the rent?

Bookshops here have been adding to the shelves for a long time. A 2005 paper by the president of the Malaysian Book Publishers Association says some bookstores "would not strictly be just bookstores", and lists school supplies, greeting cards, souvenirs and even toys.

The newer version is softer. Monocle describes a shop whose cashier desk doubles as a counter for tea or coffee, with shelves on wheels that roll aside for jazz or a literary quiz.² Another shop curates a reading room in a boutique hotel, and some of the guests have become its customers.

I couldn't find what share of any Malaysian shop's income comes from coffee or events, so I can't tell you the coffee pays the rent. My reading is that it does a different job, which is to give you a reason to walk in.

The customers who come back

The line that interests me most is about the customers. Monocle says the vast majority of that first shop's sales come from repeat customers. "Much of what they sell is available in bigger shops", it goes on, but people seek them out because they feel a connection.²

If I ran one, I'd stop staring at the chain's prices and start counting who comes back. One of those owners says they meet everyone who comes in and spend a lot of time just talking. That's expensive, and it's also the one thing I'd expect a chain to struggle to copy.