I’ll have to give this some thought before Monday, especially as I’m on the programme with Stuart Kelly, Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday, but I do have one prediction.  It’s something that struck me a few weeks ago when I read about Waterstone’s falling profits.  If Waterstone’s continues to depress the overall performance of the HMV group, it doesn’t take much to realise that the parent company will reorganise it.  It may be hived off, bought out by venture capitalists asset strippers and implode as Borders has recently done.

Alternatively, given that the best performing areas of Waterstone’s are in non-book areas such as stationery and E-readers, and the worst performing are books due to constantly reduced margins as the chain tries to compete with Amazon, HMV might absorb some branches into their record shops (are they called record shops now that no-one buys records any more?).  It has already been mentioned on The Bookseller’s website by one commenter on a thread about Borders that in Newcastle the store has been bought and “it will be an HMV with a small Waterstone’s included in store” (thanks to Book Monkey for pointing that out).

Might this be the one of the first indicators that Waterstone’s presence on the High Street will be shrinking as Gerry Johnson’s bosses realise that a policy of cutting prices to the bone and still seeing falling sales isn’t maybe the way forward?  Retaining market share shouldn’t come at the cost of increasing losses.  Maybe the route to profitability is to reduce range still further, shrink shop size and concentrate on a narrow range of highly-discounted titles on sale in huge “media megastores” alongside the cds, dvds and games consoles that already fill HMV branches?

That would suit us very well…

* Now I’ll probably get people leaving semi-literate comments informing me that actually she is a literary talent of Nobel Prize-winning standard.  In capitals.  Just like they did when I wrote about how I thought Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was a badly-written pile of poo which also had alarming opinions about what the perfect boyfriend is.  And it isn’t standing in your room watching you sleep – that’s a stalker, that is, and you need a restraining order.

I’ll come on to that in a minute but first I’d like to share with you the decidedly tasteless poster that was adorning their front window.  As one chain crashes and burns and hundreds of people lose their jobs two days before Christmas (and just along the street the Wesley Owen Christian bookshop is having a closing down sale because they’ve gone into administration) gloating about it really is classy isn’t it?  It isn’t as though everyone in the trade who even glances at the trade press is unaware of how Borders staff are feeling and given that hundreds of people were made redundant at Waterstone’s earlier in 2009, you would think that the Big W would hesitate before indulging in such schadenfreude, wouldn’t you?  Especially when figures like these are being released showing that Waterstone’s itself is hardly in rude health.

And the Waterstone’s sale?  Well, they’ve got an awful lot of Jeremy Clarkson and Delia’s new Christmas book lying around – we counted well over a hundred copies of the latter – but what was surprising was the amount of discounting going on on titles that shouldn’t really need to be discounted – titles that have been selling well for us at full price such as Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson and Climbing the Bookshelves by Shirley Williams – so it looks as though they’ve over-ordered on those and discounting heavily makes a smaller loss than the costs involved in returning them to the Hub and then back to the publishers, with all the attendant problems that have been experienced getting books out of the Hub, never mind back in and out the other side.  And the shop was a mess which never gives a good impression when combined with knock-down prices as they chase Amazon to the bottom of the market – after all, who wants to look like a bargain basement?

All in all, our visit made us feel quite pleased with how the first few months at The Edinburgh Bookshop have gone – not complacent by any means, but positive and we’re enthusiastic about the new year.  But that poster in the window – that really gave us an opportunity to feel morally superior.