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| Meryl Halls | |
During this year's BA Conference and Gardners Trade Show (September 20-21), Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association of the U.K. & Ireland, spoke of "another challenging year" for bookshops, with last year's tax increases "starting to crash to shore," the Bookseller reported.
Halls noted that booksellers have been left "reeling" from National Insurance contributions and minimum wage increases, as well as from the removal of rate reliefs. Halls also cited a recent BA survey that revealed booksellers "can suffer from harassment and intimidation" based on the books on the shelves of their bookshops, adding that this is "not a well-known thing about booksellers."
Fleur Sinclair, BA president and owner of Sevenoaks Bookshop, observed: "Our shop doors are open for absolutely anyone to walk through them. I wish I knew a way to guarantee our safety in the face of this potential hate.... I do know that by being here today, under the umbrella of the Booksellers Association, that none of us are alone. And the association's work is to do all they can to protect us, encourage us, and allow us to all trade freely."
Although the BA's membership numbers decreased slightly this year, Halls said bookselling remains an attractive career path for many, noting that a "record" number of attendees took the BA's Introduction to Bookselling training course.
In her final speech as BA president, Sinclair spoke about her goal "to help make our bookselling workforce better representative of the reading population," noting that "writers of color often struggle to find platforms, which can mean less book sales, which publishers can then interpret as it being bad business to publish anyone who isn't white.... I've seen a very definite fall in the number of mainstream publishers publishing books by black authors since the height of the Black Lives Matter movement."
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Young people in Finland are increasingly buying books in English rather than in their mother tongue, "raising fears among publishers over the future of translated literature," the Guardian reported. One in four titles sold in Finnish bookshops last year were written in a foreign language, primarily in English, according to figures from the country's association of booksellers.
Publishers said a major cause of the increased demand for English language works is BookTok, with younger readers not wanting to wait for a Finnish translation to come out to take part in the BookTok conversation, the Guardian noted, adding that Finnish-language titles brought in just €26 million (about $30.4 million) of the €57 million (about $66.5 million) generated by all fiction book sales across digital and print last year.
Leena Balme of Finnish publishing house WSOY said changed buying habits meant they had to think "very carefully whether it is worth the risk to translate a book into Finnish.... I am a bit concerned. I'm mostly concerned for the young readers. It seems a bit cool to read in English. On the streets of Helsinki you can find teenagers born in Finland with Finnish-speaking parents who speak English to each other."
She added that, curiously, the popularity of English can also be traced to some readers finding the sex scenes less embarrassing: "When you read in English you can detach yourself a little bit." --Robert Gray