Publishers have had their Dunkirk, and now Hachette is attempting to launch D-Day. Time and again over the past 15 years, publishers have retreated before the mighty negotiating power of the bookselling chains. In fighting back against Amazon, Hachette is calculating that its substantial, 15 per cent share of the retail book market, as well as the strength of its fellow publishing giants, will at last tilt back the balance of power.

How the book world has changed. When, in the 1980s, a man with a background in grocery told a meeting of publishers: “In the trade I come from, if the retailer says, ‘Jump’, the supplier asks, ‘How high?’,” the audience looked at him as if he were talking gibberish. They all know what he meant now.

First the bookselling chains expanded and started swallowing each other up. Then the Net Book Agreement, which regulated prices in bookshops, crumbled, with the result that supermarkets started selling books at heavy discounts – Asda’s promotion of the new Harry Potter paperback at £1 being among the most extreme examples. A small number of retailers began to be responsible for a huge percentage of sales of top titles, commanding huge discounts from suppliers who could not afford to do without their custom.

In retrospect, the publishers would admit that they should never have allowed discounts to get so high, and that they ought to have taken a stand much earlier. That is easy to say with hindsight. When an order from a retailer will make the difference between hitting a budget and not, and when the consequence of rejecting that order is to see the business go elsewhere, it is hard to resist, even on punitive terms.

We find it easier to sympathise with the supplier in these and similar cases: the football club negotiating with the greedy footballer, the film studio with the vain star, the publisher with the agent demanding an unfeasible advance. Amazon’s official statement about this dispute does not help us to take its side: the online retailer says: “[We are] totally committed to offering the broadest blah, blah, blah” (I summarise). Authors will certainly want Hachette to win this battle. High discounts to retailers trigger lower royalty rates.

What we forget is that these are markets. Any negotiator will want to screw out of the market as much as the market will pay. We would do the same. We also forget that bookselling is barely profitable – much less so than publishing. Waterstone’s, another tough negotiator, made 2.9 per cent on its sales last year. (Amazon’s bookselling performance is impossible to unravel, but is unlikely to rake in huge amounts of cash.) Hachette’s profit margin was 11.2 per cent.

Booksellers’ demands are not going to lessen. The leading booksellers’ market shares, and therefore negotiating clout, may well increase. Publishers are not going to stage a triumphant counter-offensive any time soon. A long war of attrition is ahead.

Nicholas Clee writes the Hot Type column in Times Books

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