Canterbury’s Biggest Bookshop Bites the Dust.

I am pretty sure that the Waterstone’s in St Margaret’s Street Canterbury is the biggest bookshop in East Kent and it’s closing for good at the end of this week.

In my opinion as a buyer of new books, it had more chance of having something in stock than most new bookshops in Kent.

This won’t leave Canterbury without a Waterstone’s as there is still the one in Rose Lane, however this one is much more café focused whereas the one that is closing was three floors of bookshop and one entirely separate floor of café.

Now I know you are thinking that this is entirely down to the internet where pretty much all of the books you could have bought in there will be cheaper, but the problem – to me a huge problem for Readers, writers and publishers, is that there will now be a huge amount of new books that readers can’t look at before they buy them.

As a secondhand bookseller I don’t have the same fundamental problem that new bookshops have, which is that it isn’t possible to compete with internet prices. On that front I just look up books on Amazon when I price the ones going on the shelves in my bookshop and obviously make mine cheaper.